Gaining an understanding of how your customers might want
(or need) to use your products and services can guide you
in creating offerings that help people succeed in many
situations and circumstances.
Whether you are developing a product or service for mass
consumption, or creating a customized solution for a
client, imagining how your audiences will consume your
material can make all the difference between their success
and failure.
This article discusses ways to predict circumstances of
use, and why it's so important to anticipate the possible
consequences and ripple effects of your customers'
potential inability to succeed.
For example, if people cannot consume your products and
services properly, will they simply be frustrated or
delayed, or could they also be at risk for losing their own
clients, customers, profitability, credibility, respect,
health, safety, or other vital outcomes?
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What Are Examples of "Routine" Circumstances of Use?
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Routine circumstances involve the range of normal or
typical modes in which people would consume your offerings.
These might occur during the day, in perfectly sunny,
non-stressful conditions, with access to plenty of help and
support in case anything goes awry. These situations might
occur:
-- At home or in one's personal life
-- In the office or in one's professional life
-- At school or in a similar learning situation
-- Traveling by foot, in a car, or on a train, subway, bus,
plane, or van
-- Exercising, such as when walking the dog, bicycling, or
jogging
You can support people's routine circumstances by providing
multiple delivery modes -- such as print, Web, audio, and
video -- that cater to different learning styles and
situations in which customers might use your products.
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What Are Examples of "Non-Routine" Circumstances?
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Non-routine circumstances are the abnormal, unusual, or
even extreme conditions under which people might need to
interact with any of your products, information, systems,
or services, including:
-- Risky or incomplete states, such as during power
fluctuations, using incorrect tools, with insufficient
resources or training, or with a substandard infrastructure.
-- Stressful or isolated conditions, such as during bad
weather, off-hours, or in remote locations, when it would
be hard to address customer concerns or provide assistance
if something failed. These include situations in which
customers might be working late into the night. They might
discover at midnight, for example, that they don't
understand a critical step in a process, or need some other
kind of essential help with your product.
So, in suboptimal circumstances such as these, how would
your offerings react? Would they be able to complete the
action flawlessly, or, almost as ideally, halt the action
intelligently and harmlessly and let your customers know
what to do next?
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How Can You Make Your Offerings More Bulletproof?
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-- Comb your "lessons learned" database from your past
projects or research your customer records to determine
whether you need to make improvements in any area.
-- Once you think you have "perfected" your offerings, test
them with real or representative customers and observe just
how well people can interact with them without your
providing assistance. These usability tests will determine
just how self-explanatory your offerings are, and how your
products would respond in a variety of different situations.
If you ensure that your offerings are bug-free and can
function properly under a range of possible circumstances,
you will prevent the aggravating headaches that could send
your audiences running for the door.
This approach can help you design more ideal routine user
experiences, while also avoiding the risks of producing
unhappy customers because you've overlooked the non-routine
situations.
In conclusion, whether you're developing a basic "how-to"
guide or a complex business system, ask yourself: Can it
pass the "midnight test"? Until you can imagine your
audiences successfully using the product, information,
system, or service in the middle of the night, in isolated
conditions, with no help available of any kind, then it's
simply not ready for prime time!
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Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of the award-winning
"Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" program.
She helps people "discover and recover" the profits their
businesses may be losing every day through overlooked
performance potential. To sign up for more free tips, visit
her site at http://LearnShareProsper.com
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