Can Your Products Pass the "Midnight Test"?
by Adele Sommers
Have you ever stopped to think that providing value to your customers results, to a large extent, from carefully considering the circumstances or conditions under which they might want -- or need -- to use your products?
Gaining an understanding of how your customers might use what you offer can guide you in finding ways to ensure that they'll succeed in any situation -- even an extreme one.
 Whether you are developing a product or service for mass consumption, or creating a customized solution for a client, imagining how your audiences will interact with your wares can spell the difference between success and failure.
This article discusses ways to predict circumstances of use, and why it's so important to anticipate the possible negative outcomes and ripple effects of your customers' inability to succeed.
For example, if people cannot interact with your products and services properly, will they simply be frustrated or delayed? Or could they also be at risk of losing their own clients, customers, profitability, credibility, respect, health, safety, or other vital outcomes?
What Are "Routine" and "Non-Routine" Circumstances?
Routine circumstances involve the range of normal or typical modes in which people would consume your offerings. These might occur during the day, in perfectly sunny, non-stressful conditions, with access to plenty of help and customer support in case anything goes wrong.
Non-routine circumstances, on the other hand, are the atypical, unusual, or even extreme conditions under which people might need to engage with your products, information, systems, or services, including:
 Risky or incomplete states, such as in power outages, using incorrect tools, with insufficient resources or training, or with a substandard infrastructure.
- Stressful or isolated conditions, such as during stormy weather, off-hours, or in remote locations, when it might be impossible to address customer concerns or provide help if anything failed. These include situations in which customers might be working late into the night. They could discover at midnight, for example, that they don't understand some critical step in a process, or need some other kind of emergency aid.
Therefore, you should consider whether your offerings will work in
a "bulletproof" mode in bad weather,
during off-hours, or in remote locations.
In suboptimal circumstances such as these, how would your offerings react? Would they be able to complete the action flawlessly, or, almost as ideally, halt the action intelligently and harmlessly and let your customers know what to do next?
Here's an Example of What "Non-Routine" Means
Imagine that Acme Fabrication needs to
install new enterprise-wide production software and
has only one weekend in which to do it during its busy
year-end season. Because of the impact on daytime production
schedules, companies like Acme often must install this
type of mission-critical software during off-hours.
However, the vendor
for this particular software system offers no
support after hours, claiming that the procedure for
installing the product is simple and mistake-proof.
Thus, Acme's controller, Rebecca M., will attempt
to complete it without help, starting at 5:00 p.m. Friday.
 By
Sunday evening, Rebecca runs into major snags, and the
system documentation offers no help for her dilemma.
Working alone, late at night, with incomplete information
and under great pressure to complete the job, she is
left with a gut-wrenching decision -- whether to:
1) Give up and reload Friday night's backup
2) Wait until Monday morning to contact technical
support in hopes of salvaging the current setup procedure,
or
3) Forge ahead until early Monday morning,
hoping that through sheer luck and experimentation, she will figure
out and resolve the problems before the production staff
arrives.
She chooses the
third option. Rebecca finishes installing the software
and because the system doesn't supply any warnings
to the contrary, the company begins to use it. No one
realizes until two months later, however, that the system
has been badly corrupted, dating all the way back to that
first weekend.
Acme must then shut
down its production operations and embark on an extremely expensive
and time-consuming resolution. Rebecca is furious with the vendor for failing to adequately test the software
setup process, make fault conditions more obvious, and
otherwise provide needed levels of support for off-hours
activities.
How Can You Make Your Products and Services More Bulletproof?
Below are two suggestions:
- Comb your "lessons learned" database from your past projects or research your customer records to determine whether you need to make improvements in any area pertaining to non-routine circumstances.
- Once you think you have "perfected" your offerings, test them with real or representative customers and observe just how well people can work with them without your providing assistance. These usability tests will determine just how self-explanatory your offerings are, and how your products would respond in a variety of different situations.
 After all, leaving
gaps in the handling of non-routine customer situations
can sour an otherwise positive relationship, if and
when such weaknesses become apparent. That doesn't mean you have to plan for every type of scenario, such as a customer
subjecting your products to deliberate acts of destruction or
using them for things for which they clearly were not
intended.
But a prudent
analysis of what could happen in anything other
than perfectly sunny, 8-to-5 conditions can point to where
you may need to bolster your product's functionality,
your customer service levels, or both.
What's the Bottom Line?
 Regardless of how simple or complex your product, document, or service is, ask yourself: Can it pass the "midnight test"?
If you ensure that your offerings are bug-free and can function properly under a range of possible circumstances, you'll prevent those aggravating headaches that could drive your customers away and cause them to vent mercilessly on the Internet.
In conclusion, until you can imagine your colleagues, clients, or customers successfully using the product, the information, system, or service in the middle of the night, in isolated conditions, with no help available of any kind, then it's simply not ready for prime time!
Copyright 2009 Adele Sommers
|
"Lessons learned" are the perfect 20:20 hindsight that we frequently have after completing a project or endeavor. This hindsight is worth its weight in gold if we mine its special value, but it's absolutely worthless if we don't make use of what it has to offer.
Read 
