This week in UX-clinic: Drowning in customer love
This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum– Drowning in customer love:
We’re a small UX group (designers & usability engineer) for a large website – we constantly face the problem of decision makers who believe in customer omnipotence – that if the customer say blinking green, we should do blinking green. If they ask for 150 links in the nav bar, we should put 150 links in the nav bar. etc. All sanity goes out the window in our org if an important customer asks for an insane thing.
We’ve tried a few times to explain a better way to use customer input, but there seems to be this impenetrable, literal faith in “the customer is always right” that we can’t get past, and it’s hurting our work. We’ll be paying for some of these bad decisions for months to come.
Two questions:
1. What’s a better philosophy for using customer input/opinion
2. How do you convert people to that philosophy (without brain transplants)– Drowning in customer love
Atleast these people know they’re wrong. Thank God for that.
There are teams that insist on implementing requests rightaway without any impact analysis. Later, they engage in mud slinging to no effect.
I would try suggesting a feature and decision tracking mechanism to be put in place. The moment someone says that “the customer is right”, just record his name and the reason for the decision as “the customer is right”. Ideally, they should see some light.
If feature requests like “add 150 links to nav bar” will have the ‘rational for implementation’ stated as “customer is right”, and if the ‘risk mitigation for feature rejection’ happens to be “analysis of the impact of adding 150 links and their effect on novice users”,
Then there will be some progress in getting the team to think about this deathmarch strategy of blindly accepting customer input as perfect.