Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:50:00 GMT
I forgot an important lesson yesterday.
Your Customers are not always the same group as your users.
This is especially relevant on ‘free’ web sites, or for people who offer ‘free’ services, and it sucks if you don’t realize this.
The customers are the ones who pay you (intrinsically or extrinsically). The users are the people who view your site. you need to remember (and I didn’t) that your site or service is also aimed at the customers.
I’m not saying the people who view the site aren’t important. The users are important as they perform a function the customer is willing to pay for, but so are the people paying the bills.
It can also help to remember this when you write your value proposition section of your business plan, as it opens up a line of thought and dialogue which you might not have had otherwise
Posted in Business Related | Tags bplan, customer, marketing | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 16 Aug 2005 14:13:00 GMT
Ok.. this really should be a series of things, as there is a lot of marketing theory out there, and most of it could be applied to how IT builds systems.. but these are the things I think are pressing.
Different people want different things out of your system.
most people know about regular users, power users etc.. but that isn’t the only way to slice your users up.
before you go and design your UI, go and do some research and see if you can ‘segment’ your user base into diffent chunks and then think what they will use your system for.
eg. a monitoring system.
The network manager cares about the health of the network, and doesn’t really give a toss if some application is dead on the machines.. not his problem.
the operations manager needs to make sure the latest deployment worked.. and the general health of the applications.
The operation engineer needs to be able to zoom down to the minute detail and figure out why this stupid system is paging him.
Design 3 different views/UI’s for them. not a single one which doesn’t do what any of them need.
How do you promote it?
The person who designed the better mousetrap died a peniless death.
no one (besides other geeks) cares about all the latest tech wizbang wizard or if you used ruby or spring or SOAP.
They want business value. Talk to them about time saved or efficiences created, or new opportunities available to them thanks to your latest program.
Do your boss a favor, prepare a single slide or two summarizing your project at that level so that he can show it in his status meeting with his peers. prepare another slide of ‘action items’ that his peers would need to do to make your project a reality, or let them gain the benefit of it.
Making your boss look good will never hurt your career.
Make it look pretty
Pretty systems get demoed. So do easy to use systems.
I should know.. I create the ugliest hardest to use systems and they sit there gathering dust.
But seriously, while it might be quite understandable to you, or to people who use your system for hours every day, the person who needs to use once a month will have no idea what to do.
Forget the spec
well, not exactly, but don’t follow it blindly. go and talk to the people who were initally questions (the users) when you have questions, or ideas on how what they really want could be done in a different way and make it much easier for them to do their job. (not because you heard of this latest cool geek thing you want to implement)
Common Infrastructure
The company does not need another user-management system inhouse.
If some other group has done it already then go interface to theirs.. your is special/different. BS. they are the same users, figure out why you think your app is special, and go to the original group and see if you can persude them.
Then go and work on something that will actually add value.
ok..enough ranting.. flame away
Posted in Business Related | Tags customer, marketing, mba, service | no comments | no trackbacks