Right now I am preparing a workshop to help a client who builds and sells physical products. We are helping them create a \u201cdevice management\u201d interface for one of their products. They want to make sure they will have happy customers.<\/p>\n
Why do companies bring me in to help them? They are experts in their products. Why do they need our services to help ensure they will have happy customers?<\/p>\n
Because of \u201cThe Curse of Knowledge.\u201d Bob Sutton uses this concept to explain how to be a better manager, but I think it is valid for us to think about why clients need to hire or bring in experience designers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Curse of Knowledge\u201d as he explains it is \u201cthe more people know about something, the harder it is for them to package explanations and instructions in ways that others can comprehend.\u201d In terms of customer experience and thinking about happy customers, this curse happens because experts, the companies and their employees, have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of their customers. More important than happy customers, is being able to put themselves into the shoes of an unhappy customer or a first-time customer.<\/p>\n
How can they \u201cforget\u201d their expertise and design an interface that embody simple tasks that allow their customers need to do.\u00a0 Simple means simple to know and simple to do.\u00a0 It should require minimum emotional and cognitive effort to turn what knowledge and needs the customer has into action.<\/p>\n
I am using my business and industrial anthropology background to help this company see their own product in new ways, most importantly in the way their customer or a first time user of their product sees their product. It is like explaining the culture of a distant tribe to a group of people. More apropos than \u201cexplaining\u201d is \u201ctranslating.\u201d One needs not only to be good at understanding their foreign tribe – the customer. But also to understand the client culture. Then figure out ways to translate the customer world-view into the client world-view.<\/p>\n