Since starting at Marketo (which is going great, by the way) I’ve become more and more impressed with the skills of Glen Lipka, our user experience architect. Just yesterday Glen, Jon (my boss) and I had an intense discussion around what tools we’ll be using to deploy our content and community.
My initial proposal was to use an integrated WordPressMU/bbPress system, abetted by a set of useful plugins, but Glen pointed out that (a) this would take quite a bit of effort and (b) not provide the best user experience since the same tasks would have two different affordances, to use Don Norman’s terminology. Instead, he convincingly argued, we’d be better off finding a malleable, extensible forum package.
The importance of this style of thinking about problems was reinforced for me when I read Mark Hurst’s post Customer experience case studies to start 2008 and seeing StaffTool, a promising new web application for churches and other non-profits that was developed by one of my fellow Joyeurs, Toby Sterret.
The converse example was my recent dealing with United Airlines. This company really does not want customers to be in real time contact with staff. The most obvious context is calling for help after one’s travel has completed, United’s phone system menu never explicitly lists an option to speak with a human except when the caller is interested in booking new travel; they leave it up to us to figure out that saying agent or operator (the system is voice-driven) will produce the result.
Don’t get me started on how useless the staff are once you do get to a live person. Not that I blame the front line grunts, mind you, who are required to follow scripts and policies given to them. While I enjoy working with customers, my situation is entirely different because, well, my product generally works well and when it doesn’t we have a great team to get things done.
No, the blame for this unconscionably poor user experience at United goes to the executives (as would the praise if pigs flew and this got fixed) and they, of course, never have to suffer from their decisions. They don’t have to listen to customer abuse from people like me who get frustrated at, say, the Kafkaesque frequent flier policies nor do they get frustrated from attempting to navigate those policies since their seats in first class are provided by the company.
I have little doubt that our founders’ decision to build Marketo based on good user experience from the get-go will be significant as we build a successful company while United Airlines’s history shows that ignoring this important factor produces terrible results.
BillSaysThis 