In my last blog post we looked at the amount of time wasted by people waiting for slow applications, and did some calculations on how much that costs an organisation.
These calculations are simple, and the numbers by themselves are quite impressive (at least to someone as easily impressed as you and me), but I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lost productivity, and the next few posts are going to explore the part that’s underwater.
Let’s start with the big picture, with consumers’ expectations of technology and how that has changed over the last couple of decades.
I recently had coffee with a user experience expert, and he gave me an interesting metaphor.
Prior to Apple, consumer technology companies had two wheels to turn in order to influence the market
- Features and functions – making the product feature-rich and powerful.
- Price – make the product cheaper.
Steve Jobs came along and looked at this picture, and instead of competing on these two he consciously decided to focus on a third dimension:
- user experience.
One of Steve’s most famous quotes is “You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around”.
(Incidentally, this was a statement he made while sincerely and gracefully responding to an inflammatory question at a conference… you can see this on video here, with the above quote at 1:53).
The elegance, usability and sheer tactile pleasure of Apple products are key reasons why people like them: they are beautiful objects, they behave the way you expect them to, they are easy to use, and they just work, and they work fast.
Apple certainly has reaped the benefits of its focus on customer experience, in hard and soft benefits.
For example, according to Fortune magazine Apple was the most admired company in the world from 2008-2012.
Their sales have boomed, with the iPhone being a standout. The market has rewarded Apple; over the last 9 years, the stock price has increased by a factor of over 50.
And guess what? IT’s customers are also consumers who probably have used Apple devices, and have developed unconscious expectations with regard to the usability and performance of technology.
Unlike consumer electronics users, your corporate IT users may not have the option of voting with their feet by going elsewhere for their IT, but delivering a second-rate user experience is becoming even more noticeable to them as consumer electronics gets better at delivering a great experience.
In forthcoming blog articles we’ll look at the effects a second-rate experience has on the user, and the effect this has on productivity.
Which wheels are you focused on in delivering IT in your organisation?
Top graph from 9 to 5 mac; top image from University of Wisconsin.
Author’s note
—————–
Wow, things change quickly.
Now Samsung stands on the shoulders of the Apple giant to dominate the smartphone market. And their user experience is amazing.
However still lots of work to be done on responsiveness of mobile web and apps. It’s at the upper levels of maturity that developers assume operational responsibility for mobile performance in production/customer environments, including the issues with latency and packet loss experienced on the last mile.
There are specific tools that address this, but as much as anything it’s the organisational culture and processes around application performance that determine what sort of experience the user has.