Have You Eaten Your Own Dog Food Lately?
I spent the better part of a morning having a miserable customer experience with a commercial software vendor’s website. I also recently had issues with my internet and cellular provider’s site. Is it me, or is the average user experience getting worse?
After thirty-five years in the computer industry building and using software products, and armed with my computer science degree, I don’t think I should need handholding very often to navigate a basic commercial webpage for basic consumer actions.
One page had me reset my password and insisted I set up new “challenge questions.” I had already established challenge questions, so I entered the same answers and got an error that answers had to be unique and could not be reused. I was stumped—I wasn’t sure how to retroactively change the name of my first pet—so I engaged chat.
“Most users just add a number to the end of the answer,” the nice person on the other end of the dialog box told me. Henceforth, my first pet shall be known as “Fluffy123.” Of course, now I have to write that down, which is a clear breach of security protocol. Perhaps there is a marketing opportunity for “security question answer management” software?
Another time, I bought a product online and received an email with a link to install it. When I clicked the link I was put on a page that said, “Click here to download and install.” I did. It took about an hour, which was not my problem—I have a 500 Mbps fiber connection to the house. When finished, I had downloaded and reinstalled several products that were already on my machine—but not the one I had purchased.
The online chat explained to me that the page I was taken to by the email had tabs (with swoopy invisible borders) at the top, and I was supposed to select the tab corresponding to my product. Even better: None of the tabs corresponded to my product, but exploration eventually found the right tab. Why didn’t the email take me to the right place to begin with?
How often do you use your company’s website? Do you make sure it doesn’t provide a user experience like the ones I’ve described? It’s important to periodically “eat your own dog food”—that is, use your own product or services in order to work out the kinks so your customers don’t have to.
Here’s a challenge: Make a list of things customers might want to do on your website, such as find a store, find store hours, call a store, buy a product, apply maintenance, set up an account, or change account details. Now find someone you love who wasn’t involved in building that site and ask them to do those things. Shut your mouth and watch over their shoulder—don’t help. If they start swearing, you have a problem with your user experience.
