Switching your customers ON not OFF

I have just read a fascinating piece that suggests that 74% of users are very satisfied with their Apple iPad but only 54% with the Amazon Kindle Fire.

The fact that the iPad is so popular isn't perhaps a huge surprise - after all that's what Apple does - creating brand recognition - making devoted consumers devoted to their devices with the ultimate user experience. Now the survey was not huge - around 200 tablet owning Americans, and I guess that the Kindle team have not quite made the leap from black and white e-readers to tablets (at least according to this study.)

The really interesting point was that many Kindle users expressed unhappiness with  the location of the on/off switch! At first thought that seems pretty trivial switch it on - use it - switch it off - there seem to be bigger issues with the user experience. However, on deeper analysis it reminds us how critical all aspects of user experience are in determining customer satisfaction. I am pretty sure that the Kindle team thought about all the buttons probably did some focus groups; but they still got it wrong for a sizeable number of respondents. Smaller companies would probably do a water cooler satisfaction study and then change the decision based on feedback (=resistance to changing the design) from the engineering team.

For software based products life is a bit easier - it is simpler to change the design of user interfaces and in some cases it makes sense to constantly offer slightly different versions and to constantly analyse performance and to tweak the product. See this great piece for a more in depth analysis.

Hardware or software, consumer or business product it is critical to get all aspects of the user experience exactly right; and as far as possible to constantly fine tune the product. At all times the focus must be customer centric. The product team needs to understand the customer segments, and to keep their understanding updated. Go to Market is a tough call balancing lots of conflicts and pressures and it's often hard to go the extra mile with RD and to meet the other constraints like time and budget.

User experience is critical; the survey didn't say how many users would not buy the product again because it had switched them off, but, given social media, peer reviews and recommendations - a poor user experience switches the competition on.