The following Q&A in the San Francisco Chronicle brings to light an important message for people designing or delivering customer experiences. You need to look at the problem from their perspective.

Q: By default, all my videos play in RealPlayer whether viewed from my hard drive or the internet, but I prefer Windows Media Player, which I also have installed on my machine. How can I make Windows Media Player my default video viewer?

A: (from the papers computer expert) Nothing to it. Open Windows Media Player, right-click the logo at the top-left-corner of the screen, point to Tools and choose Options. Tab over to File Types, click the Select All Buttons, then click OK.

There may be “Nothing to it” for this computer guy and the people at Microsoft who made Windows but it is complex and non-intuitive for a non-expert. Even if it works, there is no sticky logic that will make this and future operations in windows follow some easy to understand logic. Customers like me will be just as frustrated and made to feel helpless. The underlying concept doesn’t just apply to Microsoft; it applies to any new rules a customer has to learn to extract value. The message, make it easy to learn to do the task and to gain the know-how to generalize.
 
Help customers know (more) and gain know-how and you will not only eliminate the negative customer experience (frustration and helplessness) but you will deliver an enhance customer experience in the form of psychological gratification. And, psychological gratification fosters future desire.

Posted by John Todor on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 1:58 pm.