Build Customer Loyalty into your Application

 

When designing and building a software solution, you must always keep your users in mind.  These may seem like minor details or not worth the coding effort but saving your users time, money and even their business can go a long way to building customer loyalty.  

Here are a couple real-life little UX and system changes that had a huge impact on a user or even a company.

"Could I just hit enter"

This question came from a user of a sales ordering software application.  At the top of the Orders screen, there was a text box where the user would enter a sales order number.  They then would tab or use the mouse to click a lookup / find button.  

As a team, we thought the UX was very cool, just 2 steps to look or find an order.  We had a session with the user to show off our new UI, with all the bells and whistles.  They were very polite and liked what we showed.

At the end, we asked a simple question, "What do you think?".  She said it was nice, but would it be possible to just hit the enter key once the order number was entered?

It took 30 seconds to implement this simple request, add the search method to the text box entered key press.  Once we showed the user it was like she won the lottery.  

To this day I am amazed that even after the design, coding, and testing, this simple little change the user asked for did more to sell the application and make the customer one of our best for our company.

"Can we just do this in one click not three"

We had a document management system that allowed you to scan in, and add attributes and values to your document.  This was a multiple-step process.  We had just finished a complete rewrite of the application, and new technologies.  We tried to keep the UX just as it was before to help increase adoption rates.

We had one of our biggest customers as part of the beta.  The only feedback we got was in their process, the labeling of the document was done on 1 form and saved in 1 click.  It now took 3 clicks to get the same work done.

Now to us, the additional 2 clicks seemed like not a big deal.  So being cocky developers we asked, "Why do 2 extra clicks matter?".

Their answer put us in our place: "Do have a team of 10 people processing from 100 to 200 documents each.  You added up to 4,000 clicks per day, 880,000 clicks per year.  That is an extra couple of people we would need to hire, just to get the same amount of work done."

That answer put the team in their place.  Needless to say, we made the change to only require 1 click.  It was less than a day's worth of work, even with testing.

Disgrutal Employee

I was working on a CRM application.  The customer is the major object in this type of application.  We had a customer call us in a panic one day.  They had a disgruntled employee who had deleted all the customers from the database using the UI.

They did not have a database backup, they did not limit users roles and they did not manage their employees very well.  All this is true.  We could have just said your screwed and I have been at a place where that was the answer.

I had seen this before and part of the developer's job is to write software that not only works but also improves the users' lives.  Even if just a little.

For this system, we implemented a soft delete process.  We could have gone with an audit trail, or an event log, but a simple soft delete was easy and did what we needed.  The actual work was less than 2 days.

When a user deleted a customer record, we would set a property on the record that showed it had been deleted.  Then on any request, we would just filter out any records where the delete property was true.

We then had a service that would purge the deleted records after a configurable amount of time, the default was 30 days.

We simply got on the phone with the customer in an interactive session and reverted all the deleted flags.  And like magic, the customer returned.  

The owner of the company called our CEO and thanked us professly.  He said we had saved his business.  Without his customer, we would have gone out of business.

By spending a few extra days of work and by having the developers understand how important their application is to their users, we were able to save someone's business.

Summary

These are just 3 examples where a developer spends a little extra time, listening and understanding their users improving multiple lives and even saving a business.

As developers, we need to understand and focus on more than the technology, the process, and the thrill of solving the problem.

Remember this next time you are in a meeting about the quality of your application or user feedback and you hear all the familiar responses:  "That's user training", "The user should not do that", "I don't know how they did that" and my least favorite "The user is stupid".

This will become even more important when we are leveraging AI more in the development of an application.  AI is an excellent tool for a developer, but do you think it could have resolved these types of changes without a developer really understanding the user, the domain, and the importance of the application they are developing.