Guest Speaker
I finally had something useful happen at work. We had a consultant that uses one of our products during the course of his job come in and give a quick presentation on how he uses the tool. Unfortunately, it's not the product I work on, but it was still interesting for a number of other reasons. As quick background, the tool demo'ed is a storage monitoring tool.
Three Users of Enterprise Software
Nothing new here, but Enterprise software users typically fall into three categories: experts in a domain using the software to make their tasks easier, users largely ignorant of the domain that want an expert in a box to tell them what to do, and executives that want some charts to determine if things are running smoothly: the infamous "dashboard."
The person we had in was definitely an expert in the domain. Listening to how he uses the software to determine if a customer's installation is running smoothly was very educational. Often, features seem to get added to a product by people that don't really understand how those features are going to be used. It's put in just in case someone might find it useful or, worse yet, a customer demanded it without explaining why the wanted it.
This part interested me because, through his demo, he identified a ton of information that the "expert in a box" customer would drool over. Apparently the way he used different pieces of information wasn't just news to me, it was news to the current development team as well. They furiously scribbled while he showed how he used combinations of charts to find configuration errors, determine the need for new equipment, and a number of other things. He also suggested some features that would make his life easier and explained why he didn't use certain parts of the system at all.
Hired Guns
I, like most people, really value the input of a customer or, if that's not available, a customer advocate. The problem is that most product owners in a typical company don't seem to really understand what a customer needs. They pay more attention to what the competition is doing or at most what the squeakier wheels in their customer base say they want.
As early as possible you should post a position on one of the online job sites looking for an expert in whatever problem domain you're working. Throw them a few thousand dollars or so to just come in and show you what it is they do. Do all the standard information mining stuff on the poor bastard. Make sure the developers are involved. Try and build a tool that is useful to him and at the same time captures some of his knowledge for the EIAB (expert in a box) user. After you build a few iterations of the product, ask another one in to evaluate the product. Repeat, get the EIAB user to check it out, etc etc. Did I mention that you should make sure the developers are involved?
Ship your product, sell your product, host a message board for customers of your product, make the developers participate on the board. Keep that interaction with the customer going. At some point, throw a few extra grand at an expert that uses your product and record a demo session to include in your product. Something to orient the expert customer and maybe teach the EIAB user to be more effective. It's not like anyone reads the manual. That training video can double as sales literature, too.
No Shit
Yeah, it's pretty obvious. A veritable no-brainer. I'm ashamed for even suggesting such an obvious idea. Now why, if it's so obvious, is it that I've never seen this done at any organization at which I've worked?
May 25th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
[...] Another thing I noticed during the expert user presentation was how he used the information in the application. He leaned heavily toward using the charts and graphs in the application rather than the tables. From his viewpoint, the tables were useless. He didn't care about 99% of the individual incidents in the tables. He just wanted to see the overall trends. Multiple pieces of information were presented as different components of a single graph with a vertical line cursor that allowed him to compare the timing of different events from different mini-graphs. When he found something out of the ordinary he could click and drag to view a table version of a point in time. This is vastly superior to what I normally see–disconnected table and chart views with the tabular format being the kitchen sink view of things. [...]