Susie Wyshak's Hub

Too often it seems companies and websites create experiences for “average use” without accounting for a  customer passionately in love or hate. These are often called “edge cases” that we deal with when the time comes. As a customer it often comes to a “push me over the edge” case.

Here are a few examples of things I often think about when it comes to thinking like a customer:

• A new web user with 0 data in their account – Whether the service you’re providing is a utility (a bank, a calendar, etc) or a “just for fun” website, it’s critical to consider the new and infrequent user experience. For example only occasionally do I go to MySpace. Recently I explored their Applications area for the first time and learned “This page lists 3rd-party websites you have linked to your account. You can control which data you share with each site, or remove that link completely. Your account is not linked to any 3rd-party websites at this time.”That’s all she wrote. Just for the sake of this blog post, I searched the FAQ and found: No matches for: applications
• When your pages have 0 data – A colleague working on a site that depends largely on “user-generated content” recently noted “our empty pages just look empty.” Give your visitors a friendly nudge to contribute. Or include some sort of direction and suggested next step of navigation, so they stick around on your site.
• The 1% customer with tons of data in their account – What happens when someone stretches your design way beyond what you’d planned? Sure you can design for ugliness. Often in a testing or design process I see a few items listed which always looks sexy and great but does not anticipate those “edge” cases. That’s one reason Facebook switched to a more modular design, after single pages stretched for miles with applications and conversations.
• When you don’t know the answer – What does your “page not found” page look like? What might you put in that page aside from asking the visitor to report the problem to you? Whatever you do, make sure to add writing content for this page to your website plan vs. keeping the default “404″ page.
• An angry customer - An urgent matter came up with Virgin Airlines, who called me last night. I asked if I could reach the rep, who was based at the airport, by calling back the local number from which she’d called. She replied affirmatively. When I called, it not only went to their central customer service but they had a cute message about “if we like your voice we may ask you to leave us all voicemails.” OK, I wrote it off as an attempt to be personable. But when I followed the phone tree to baggage issues, the recording said they were closed.
• An angry repeat customer - I hung up and called again shouting “agent” into the phone. (Whenever my friends and I have to shout into a phone tree we secretly laugh at how silly it seems.) Yet I still had to listen to the “if we like your voice” message. At this point I was desperate and hearing that again was nowhere near cute. My suggestion is to say we might use you in a commercial, which would have a dual purpose of customers trying to act more pleasant in the face of stress, with hopes they might appear on a commercial.

There are many more examples and best practices, and I’d love to hear yours!

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