Customer Experience: Simplicity vs. Functionality

When building complex software its easy to forget about simplicity for the sake of functionality. A web service like twitter does one thing. you post a short message about what you are doing. there are only so many ways your can present the user interface to allow for that. twitter has a simple interface because its functionally simple in what it does. Facebook gets more complex in what you can do and therefore the interface is more complicated and as tools get more sophisticated its easy to make the simplicity of using them harder to understand. Ideally each function you add to a software application should be as easy to use as the first one. Just because your service provides lots of cool features does not mean it cannot have a simple interface for each one of those features. if you were to graph simplicity vs. functionality you would see that simplicity decreases as functionality increases. some products like the iPhone have focused heavily on simplicity even when great amounts of functionality have been provided. Other products like Adobe photoshop just assume you want the functionality no matter how hard it is to figure it out.

Customer Experience: New Hire

We added a new member to our Customer Experience team this week. She started Wednesday and by Friday was already owning one of our responsibilities of a monthly eletter to our customers. That's what i call hitting the ground running. Part of that comes from hiring the right person. we use a book Who: The A Method for Hiring which has some great questions and recommendations about hiring the right person. An Interview is all about first impressions. These impressions go both ways, the job seeker is trying to impress you but you are also impressing upon the job seeker. dont ask anything you can learn from the resume. ask questions about who they are and not what they have done. see if the job seeker asks you questions. they cant possibly know everything about the job you are offering so they better have some questions about what they will be doing.