How Do You Measure Your Customer "Wow" Factors?
by Adele Sommers
 Do you know what really thrills your customers about your offerings? I don't mean what merely gets them temporarily excited, such as the promises you make in your marketing campaigns. Rather, I'm referring to the subtler, cumulative effects of impressing your audiences -- by systematically building in and assessing the quality of your products and services.
This article (Part 2 in a series; see Part 1 here) discusses how to measure four types of "wow" factors that, taken together, will contribute to that overall positive impression. Each one individually might not be enough to cause a buying stampede, but without them, your wares probably won't gain much traction in the marketplace. When combined, they will generate an indescribable sparkle that sets your products and brand apart from all others.
We've pondered the importance of initiating testing and evaluation very early in the product life cycle to ensure that what you're producing will be conceptually and structurally sound. Using the functional testing methods described below, you can evaluate whether you're giving enough attention to each "wow" factor.
Wow Factor #1: Ideal Features
In the requirements phase, you can assess whether your initial feature ideas are the very best ones by comparing design alternatives. To do this, you would methodically mock up, test, and evaluate not just one, but several competing prototypes -- each of which embodies a different set of features, functions, or characteristics. You would do this before cementing the requirements for your product, system, or solution.
 Why? After studying the results from these prototype comparisons, you'd have the ability to combine the very best features from each if the alternatives into a single set of requirements for an outstanding design. That's exactly how Toyota has achieved such remarkable historical success in the auto-manufacturing world.
This approach need not be expensive -- you can do it as simply as creating competing mockups for a Web site, for example, and then asking several people to evaluate and identify the best aspects of each. By repeating the process, you can continue to blend their selections into your list of requirements. This method usually produces far better results than adopting the very first concept produced.
Wow Factor #2: Ease of Use
In the design phase, conducting usability tests of new product designs or Web site interfaces is an ideal way to reveal any difficulties with the planned features, format, or organization. The purpose is to determine whether the interface will be effortless to interpret -- and whether any tasks you expect your customers to perform will be intuitive, efficient, and simple to carry out. Usability tests are always meant to find weaknesses in the interface design, not in the testers' capabilities.
Because there will surely be areas of misinterpretation and confusion, the ideal time to catch them is cheaply and early -- before you have invested extensive time and resources in a polished design, or worse yet, a finished product. How do you go about doing this?
 You can start by creating simple paper prototypes of the interface for your Web site, software system, device, machine, gadget, or whatever you are designing, using inexpensive materials such as cardboard, paper, sticky notes, pens, markers, scissors, and tape.
- Meanwhile, you would recruit representative users to do the testing who know little or nothing about the system. As few as five to ten test subjects can provide very useful information. Depending on who your target audience is, recruitment could be very informal. For example, your colleagues, friends, or relatives might represent your customer base.
- Before testing, pre-script a series of typical tasks (such as finding information or purchasing something on a Web site). Then ask each tester to think out loud while attempting to complete them. The testers would point to or verbalize the steps they think they would take, rather than pressing physical buttons or using a mouse.
If you obtain their permission to record the sessions, or have observers watching the process, you can collect a wealth of information -- then make improvements and continue the testing. (For a source of further information, see "The Author Recommends," below.)
Wow Factor #3: Simplicity and Elegance
 During the design phase, you also should perform a difficulty analysis. For each new planned version, ask:
- Does the system guide people in achieving their real-world goals?
- Have you prevented all unnecessary options and features from creeping in?
- Have you automated or kept to a bare minimum all tedious setup?
- Have you performed a "hassle hunt" to remove known customer annoyances?
Depending on the answers, you might need to add more guidance, simplify the design, or hide complexity more elegantly.
Wow Factor #4: Bug-Free Operation
The development phase of a software project is the time to initiate automated alpha tests. Alpha tests repeatedly verify all system components that are still under development. System developers would create alpha tests to validate each unit of code they write, and then run them automatically on a nightly basis to confirm that no defects have crept in when they happen to modify that code.
 When alpha testing occurs consistently, it's a highly cost-effective process because it can detect bugs before they become buried and cause major headaches. An analogy would be ensuring that your plumbing is set correctly before pouring a concrete foundation. Once defects become buried, your project costs, schedule, and quality will suffer if you have to "crack open the cement" to locate and fix them later!
Toward the end of the development phase, rigorous beta testing should occur. That's when people with varying degrees of familiarity with your system validate it using a structured test plan (to be discussed in a related article). If you conduct beta testing effectively, it will require several passes, so you should plan for several rounds in your budget and schedule.
In conclusion, by continuously measuring your customer "wow" factors -- such as ideal features and functions, ease of use, simplicity and elegance, and error-free operation -- your efforts will pay for themselves many times over through customer loyalty, a solid reputation, and increased profitability.
Copyright 2007 Adele Sommers
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Today, we'll continue our exploration of building quality into our products and services from the ground up. When we do this effectively, it ought to ignite our audience's attention and enable our offerings to stand out from the crowd. 
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