Understanding Customers

Understanding customers helps us design good digital experiences for them. If you don’t try to understand who will be using your applications—and how—you will design software that only meets your own goals. This means you will have limited control over the kind of experience your customers will have when they use your software. Maybe they won’t understand it, won’t like it, or won’t want what it has to offer.

To avoid that disaster, the three most important questions to ask are:

Why are customers using my application?
How will customers use it?
Who are my customers?

These questions will provide a foundation upon which you’ll figure out your customers’ goals and address those goals. Next, we look at the other questions you should ask.

Using Influence
When a customer uses an application, they inevitably do so with some intention in mind. They might have a specific goal, or they could just be killing time. Understanding and addressing the range of motivations customers have will help you create a more compelling experience for them.

Some customers may routinely use a commerce application just because they’re running low on staples. Others might be anxious about cooking for gourmet friends. A browser might just be curious about the range of vegetarian foods. Or they might be sneaky competitors, checking out your delivery promises. Do these customers have any particularly strong desires or frustrations you might want to address? Use your influence to address customer needs and create a good impression.

To gain insight into the influence needed to address customer concerns, begin by examining and addressing these issues:
• What does the customer expect to happen?
• What does the customer want the outcome of using the application to be?
• What do you want the outcome of the customer experience to be?
• How do customers feel about the nature of your application beforehand?
• How do you want customers to feel after using your application?
• Does anyone else influence a customer’s goals?
• Are customers likely to leave the application before they’ve reached their goal?

It’s highly likely that a customer will expect to be able to do certain things. Say you manage a banking application. Customers may expect to be able to pay their credit card bill via your application. Or, they may want to find out banking-related information, such as whether one bank’s mortgage rates are lower than another’s. Anticipating the customer’s expectation of the process will strengthen your application and help to meet the customer’s goals. Does the customer expect the application to be fast, fun, easy, or hard to use? Meet positive expectations, and pleasantly surprise them by addressing negative ones.

The emotional state of the customer has a great deal to do with how he or she might use an application. Understanding customer motivation and emotional state will help anticipate whether certain customers within a given demographic will leave before achieving transactional fulfillment. Again, anticipating a customer’s goals and addressing them quickly and cleanly will help keep customers engaged.

In addition to considering what customers feel when visiting your application, you need to take into account what happens offline as well. For example, someone might use knowledge gained at the application‚s website to impress the boss and get a promotion. Is it your responsibility to ensure that the latest management guru books are available? Or maybe it means providing reviews of books.

What are your customer’s goals? Defining them may involve acknowledging uncomfortable truths. Are customers to a health advice application seriously worried about an embarrassing health problem, or are they just morbidly curious?

A good health advice application can aim to reassure, or restore confidence. Perhaps you’d like sick people to feel that their problem is taken seriously, or healthy people to understand what it’s like to have that illness. Figure out what your customers are feeling, and give them what they need.

Remember that outsiders influence online decision-making. Children pester parents for particular toys or groceries. Or customers may want to discuss ideas for holiday destinations with friends or family. Are these people affected by the outcome of a customer visiting your application? Knowing this beforehand puts you “as the developer” in a position to influence positively the decision-making of your application customers.

How People Really Use Applications
Think about the characteristics of the interaction the customer has with an application. The goal of every designer and developer is to attract a large, regular audience, who are also, ideally, regular purchasers. But this isn’t usually realistic. An even high profile application that‚s content is updated daily find that 80% of their audience every day is first time customers. By understanding how people are likely to interact with your application, you can gauge what opportunity you have to create the right impression.

To gain this understanding, ask these questions:
• How do people find your application? What screens might they see first?
• How often are customers likely to need the application?
• How long will a visitor stay? How much of this time are they really using
• the application, or doing something else?
• What are the important usability considerations?
• What are the important service considerations?
• Are there online or offline counterparts to the service you’re offering?
• Does the customer have to enter any information?

Remember, the first screen a customer sees might not be the front door. Clearly you want any page a customer might stumble onto to give a good first impression. Additionally, you might think that if your content is updated daily a customer will come back daily. While this probably won’t happen with most people, do try to anticipate the frequency of application usages. Think how this will affect a design: regular customers will get irritated if they have to sit through the same animated splash screen every time they use your applications.

The length of time a customer stays on an application is important, particularly on sports applications and websites. For instance, cricket matches go on for a day or more, and the outcome does not generally depend on just one or two incidents. Fans might keep a live score window running all day in the background at work while completing many other tasks without interruption. Conversely, football (soccer) matches are shorter but can be decided in a few crucial moments. So if fans don’t want to miss that all-important penalty, they’ll be concentrating on your application’s commentary.

For Web applications with complex forms, preventing errors is a priority. And knowing your audience is critical. Which is more important: ease of use for new customers, or fast access to information for regulars? Fulfillment is a huge issue nowadays. Amazon’s fast service has created very high expectations among online shoppers. You need to tell customers how long it will take for a CD to be delivered, or they’ll get frustrated when it doesn’t turn up for two weeks.

When it comes to asking a customer to enter information, such as through a form, you must think about the kind of technological solutions you’ll use. Web customers are incredibly fickle. How can you use technology to make the input process easier?

If customers are inputting data, where do they get it from, where are they sending it to, and do they mind? Privacy is a major issue, especially for more experienced customers. If forced to enter information they suspect will be used for advertising purposes, they may lie. If forced to enter too much personal information, chances are they are going to bail. Especially if they are perceived as frivolous marketing questions that don’t directly affect the desired outcome of using the application.

Personalities, Profiled
When it comes to the actual people who are coming to your application, you may choose to try and capture some personal information. Indeed, if you’re trying to recruit customers for research or usability testing, you’ll have to find a way of deciding whom to recruit. This is often the information that helps you find the right people. Just remember that there may be more than one type of customer with one particular goal, and that one customer may have more than one goal at different times.

Whatever kind of application you’re building, you absolutely must ask:
• What is the minimum standard of technology you have to design for?
• How comfortable are the customers with technology? Do they have a high level of expertise?
• How much does a customer already know about the subject matter of your application?
• How are you going to cater for special needs?

Making life easy on customer’s means knowing what technology base you are designing for. Survey operating systems, browsers, and plug-ins. You might think that Netscape is now so rare that you can afford to ignore that market, or you might find that among your particular audience, older browsers are common enough to require consideration. Remember that in the US the Americans with Disabilities Act and related legal cases demand access to information for disabled people.

There is some evidence that level of a customer’s online experience impacts usage style. What is the level of your customer’s experience? An application geared toward the senior population should have different usability concerns than an application for teens. This gets us into the tricky stuff: demographic information. This is a seductive process, because demographics are fairly easy to measure and understand. In turn, it’s easy to take this information and target people who fit into tidy categories.

Examples of demographic information might be:
• Geographical location
• Age
• Relationship status
• Size of family
• Sociability
• Gender
• Educational level
• Income

But demographics are not always useful when it comes to design decisions. Imagine you’re publishing sports news online. Your marketers say “We want to target 25-45 year old professionals with high disposable incomes who are likely to buy online.” This might help them plan an advertising campaign, but does putting people into an age bracket really help you understand what they want from their sports news? Usually, it won’t. The only way you can use this information is to do time-consuming research of a representative sample of this age group and that’s very hard.

If you go with general demographics, you risk making assumptions based on your own opinions about 25-45 year olds. You might completely miss the fact that retired people could be a big potential market.

It’s much more useful to ask what fans of different kinds of sports are interested in. Football fans probably have different expectations than fans of cricket or other sports, and it’s generally more successful to target people on interests rather than demographics.

Testing Your Usefulness
Naturally, exercise your own judgment to prioritize the questions in this article. Don’t spend time worrying about information you can’t actually use. If you’re unsure if a given question or approach is appropriate, ask yourself “Would I do anything differently depending on the answer to this question?” Get someone else to play devil’s advocate, and see if you can justify really needing that information. The end goal is to give your customers what they need, and create a successful application that’s great to use.

Successful digital experiences depend upon a variety of factors. Understanding customers helps us design for them. When you try to understand who will be using your applications—and how—only then will you design software that meets their goals.

download the WORD .DOC (44k)