I’m getting hands-on experience with DevOps.
No, not as a member of a DevOps team. It’s that I use Office 365.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Office 365, to the extent it’s possible to like this sort of thing.
Except that once a week or so when I fire up my laptop, I have to hunt for features that mysteriously moved from their accustomed spot on the ribbon when I wasn’t looking.
It’s like Who Moved My Cheese?, where someone moved the protagonists’ cheese to an unknown location with no obvious reason for doing so and little or no notification that it had happened.
So to all you hardworking DevOps team members, and especially to the fine folks responsible for implementing Office 365’s epics, features, and user stories (here at KJR headquarters we’re nothing if not Fully Buzzword Compliant (FBC)) …
To all you hardworking folks: DevOps’ CI/CD mantra can stand for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment.
If it’s Deployment and what you’re Continuously Deploying includes UI changes, CD has a third translation: Continuous Distraction.
Which brings us to the serious business of self-promotion, specifically, the impending (September) release of There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.
User Interface and User Experience design is one (or are two, depending on your perspective) of the topics we touch on in the book. In it we establish what most businesses should establish as their core UI/UX metric: Annoy customers and users as little as possible.
Yes, yes, yes, Tom Peters is still flogging excellence and delighting customers as what you should strive for. And far be it from my co-author, Dave Kaiser, or myself to denigrate excellence or customer delight in general.
It’s in particular that we have some concerns, namely, the nature of many business relationships is such that customers have no interest in being delighted. If you’re among them, managing to not irritate them is doing well.
Trying to delight them inevitably results in more and longer contacts, when what they want are fewer and shorter ones.
And if you accept the KJR distinction between quality (absence of defects and adherence to specs) and excellence (flexibility, customizability, adaptability and the presence of desirable features) … if you accept this distinction, simply delivering what you promised to deliver — quality — might not be enough to delight anyone, but compared to your competitors and earlier self they might be pleasantly surprised.
Try to get inside your customers’ heads. When they’re looking to buy something, what do they care about? What do you care about when you’re looking to buy something?
While not a universal truth, the odds-on favorites are price and convenience.
Look at the big business success stories of the last few decades, and for every Excellence-and-Delight example (Facebook and Twitter, maybe?) companies that focus on price and convenience are making a lot more money. Google, Amazon, and Uber are three noteworthy examples. At least they are from the perspective of revenue. I’m thinking Uber will turn a profit before investors lose interest, but you never know.
Google is an interesting example because when we use it we aren’t its customers. We’re its product, to which it sells access to its customers, which are the advertisers who want to reach us so as to tell us their stories. Google makes buying access to us easy. Whether it’s cheap depends on the details of how you measure the cost of customer access. Certainly, it’s no more expensive than the other ways businesses have to gain access to interested buyers.
Amazon is more straightforward. Whether you’re looking at its bread-and-butter retailing, its Kindle books, or AWS, price and convenience are everything.
Likewise Uber. Compared to traditional taxis, Uber costs less and is a lot more convenient. Uber doesn’t delight its customers except by comparison. But it sure has thought through the factors that irritate ride buyers and has done quite a good job of minimizing them.
There are, of course, exceptions to the price-and-convenience rule. If you’re in the business of selling Lamborghinis, Ferraris, or Aston Martins, neither price nor convenience are what your customers are after. Likewise if you own a professional sports team or Marvel and its stable of superheroes. If that’s you, excellence and delighting your customers by giving them a great experience is exactly what you need to do, because the customer experience is what you’re selling and they’re buying.
If, on the other hand, you’re the purveyor of more prosaic merchandise, just not irritating your customers is a pretty high bar.
Somehow, Bob, you’ve got the magic with KJR. Price and convenience? Check. Customer delight? Double check!
Thanks so much for another thought-provoking piece with actionable insight.
Amen. Quit moving things. Better yet … Stop removing features that can’t possibly have any cost to maintain .. and add a dark background instead! CD … Constant Disarray … My experience has been the devs and qa departments test the simple positive case and push to production without testing anything complex or extreme/borderline values. Repeatedly.
Every feature in a software product has a maintenance cost.
another high quality piece. LOVE the last line
I think a lot of the difference between delight and not irritating is the size of your market. As noted, the Ferrari buyer needs some delight. The toilet paper purchaser isn’t looking for delight, but is certainly not looking for a rash ether.
I remember when Google first came out with the completely empty search engine screen. Compared to Yahoo’s dewey decimal display of every possible category of information on the first page, it seemed too sparse and too weird and “obviously” would never catch on.
But of course, the real trick is actually helping people get the job they want done. Does stuff adhere to the toilet paper properly? Is it easier to find stuff clicking thru a bunch of categories I’m unfamiliar with or is it easier to just type stuff in and find it (and then have the typing get easier and easier as suggestions pop up).
Early adopters don’t mind a zillion setup screens on their smartphone and think it’s kewl they have to do the same thing with their Tesla. Mass market folks not so much. The Pixel is surprisingly clean and requires pretty much zero setup to be not only usable but almost indispensable after just a week of use. I cannot say the same thing about Samsung or iPhones.
OTOH, I really, really like how the Pixel automatically puts the icons I often use on the front automatically, but I really, really hate the way the menu options move and reappear in different places in Office. Probably part of that issue is there are a lot more unavoidable options in Office. If you’re trying to be everything to everyone, there’s a lot more possible points of failure.
You couldn’t pay me to willing use online software as an integral part of my work where I don’t control the updates. I have to accept my organization’s Web site, but luckily they don’t change it often. When I’m working, I want control of my “tools”.
When designing user interfaces, I try to adhere to something I acquired many years ago. I call it “The Principle of Least Surprise.” Everybody thinks he can design a UI, but no matter what design you choose, somebody is going to be amazed that you chose to implement the thing the way you did. You should try to surprise as few people as possible.
There are also typically 3 classes of users of your software, novices, casual users, and experts. Microsoft happily sacrifices the experts for the novices. Microsoft has annoyed me for years by redistributing their user interfaces. So it ain’t just their current incarnation.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Sometimes, there are just irritated customers, no matter what you do.
Thank you for the commentary.
Why “There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.” and not “A Handbook for Intentional Business Change.” Much bigger market and you can still use a bunch of IT examples. IT people won’t mind the name change.
Dave and I went back and forth on this. In the end, we figured that (1) “no IT projects” would be more attention-getting; and (2) it would resonate with my core audience.
But it was a tough call, and in fact I suggested to our publisher that we release it under both titles to see which one would sell better. Turns out the logistics of publishing a book made that impractical.