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Ed Brill and client satisfaction

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky

Ed Brill

Got into a good discussion, wanted to post my comment on my own blog as well.

On the topic of surveys of end user satisfaction with software products:

Overall, I haven’t put too much weight on these types of surveys. What I WOULD be interested in is a survey of end users who have used multiple email systems, and their preference.

It seems like Notes would blow others out of the water, if the end users knew what they were missing. But often they don’t. A perfect example of this is a sametime rollout I was involved in for a small company of about 400 users. No-one understood why we were rolling it out, they were satisfied with what they had. Two months later, we were averaging 10,000 sametime conversations per month, 80% of them business related. About 6 months later, we had a minor error with the server’s hardware, and you’d better believe people missed it.

I think of it like this – people using exchange or others are like workers with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The tools allow them to do more work more quickly, and they are happy with what they have. Then you give them the dump truck and backhoe of Notes 6/6.5/7. Not only can they continue doing the same old thing, but they have the tools to accomplish much more.

The only dependants are the user’s desire to learn how to use their new tools effectively, and the ‘drive factor’. By ‘drive factor’, I mean the choice the user has to make whether to continue putting forward the same amount of effort with the new tools and accomplish more, or accomplish the same goals with less effort.

I think the latter happens a little too much, and this seems to me to be some of the source of the ‘Notes is too complicated’ argument. Not that I think the Notes UI is complicated, I think it is very intuitive. But I think the real argument some of these people are making is, ‘Notes is too complicated…because I don’t need such a capable tool to accomplish the lower goals I have set for myself’. For end users, this is a management problem, but it’s not hard to see this attitude in management, developers, etc.

Comments (0) | January 11th, 2006