Can You Pass the “Midnight Test”?
by Adele Sommers
Gaining an understanding of how your customers might use what you offer can guide you in investigating ways to ensure that they will succeed in any situation — even in extreme conditions or circumstances.
 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 Non-Routine Circumstances of Use?
Non-routine circumstances are the ones we must be especially alert for. These are the atypical, unusual, or even extreme conditions under which people might need to engage with our 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 inclement 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 during storms, power outages, or in inaccessible locales.
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 accounting software, and
has only one weekend in which to do it in 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 software offers no
support after hours, claiming that the procedure for
installing it is “simple and mistake-proof.”
Therefore, Acme’s controller, Dan M., will attempt
to complete it without any help, starting at 5:00 p.m. Friday evening.
However, by
Sunday evening, Dan runs into several major snags, and the
system documentation offers no help for his dilemma.
Working alone, late at night, with little or no information
and under great pressure to complete the job, he is
left with a gut-wrenching decision regarding 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, he will figure
out and resolve the problems before the production staff
arrives.
 Dan chooses option #3. He finishes installing the software, and because the system doesn’t supply any warnings
to the contrary, the company begins to use it.
Yet no one
realizes until two months later that the system
has been badly corrupted, dating all the way back to the weekend of
installation.
Acme must now shut
down its production operations and embark on a very expensive
and time-consuming resolution.
Dan is furious with the vendor for failing to fully test the software
installation process, ensure that any fault conditions are obvious to users, and
otherwise provide needed levels of support for off-hours
activities!
How Can You Make Your Products and Services More Bulletproof?
Below are just a few of many relevant recommendations:
- 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.
- Design your products and services to install and configure themselves as intelligently as possible, with little or no need for human intervention.
- Incorporate redundant measures in your products or services to handle any snafu that could arise, based on a wide range of user scenarios.
- Run copious beta tests, stress tests, and automated load tests, as well as usability tests with real or representative customers to observe just how well people can install and use your products without any assistance. These tests will identify just how self-explanatory your offerings are, and how your products would respond in a variety of different situations.
- Provide clear, unambiguous documentation that fully explains how to install and use the product, and what resolution procedure to use after hours. There should be a 24/7 support system to quickly assist in these situations.
 That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to plan for every conceivable scenario, like customers
subjecting your products to deliberate acts of sabotage, or
using them for things for which they clearly were not
intended.
But a prudent
analysis of what could happen in any situations other
than perfectly sunny, 8-to-5 conditions should point to areas 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 products or services are, ask yourself: Can they 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.
Unless you can imagine your customers, colleagues, or clients successfully using your product, 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 2023 Adele Sommers
|
When you begin the process of designing your offerings, you might assume that all you need to do is choose the types of products and services you want to develop, and then figure out which features should go into each one. 
On the surface,
this idea seems pretty straightforward. But what does convenience really mean in the world today?
Isn’t it empowering people to learn or do something
at any time of day or night, in any mode they wish,
such as:
