Re: UKNM: RE: Customer Experience

[Danny O'Brien]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 11:11:27AM -0000, John Braithwaite wrote:

JB writes:

 > 

 > It reminds me of talking to a techie who had just come up with a page that

 > could randomly display 20 book jackets from a selection of 40,000. Cool -

 > maybe, but why would our customers want it?

 > 

 > Perhaps this particular programmer wanted all the visitors to recognise his

 > skills: "oh, that's really clever, it must have been programmed by a

 > genius!" Why else?


Actually, a lot of the time what's involved is for someone to recognise

that's what has been done is "cool" in the sense that no-one else is

able to do it yet, and then take advantage of the enthusiasm to

produce a unique feature that users do want. That techie just gave you

something for free. You don't have to use it, but politeness would

require you to think about what is clever behind it, and then see

if you can use *that* to create a value added service, rather than

just question the motivation. There's a reason why these things

are called demos, after all.


For instance, why not retool the program to produce automatic book

images for a banner ad? The random bit is just a place holder (it's

the easiest part of the page to write) - perhaps your techie could come up

with the top ten selling books instead. That way, you get ten unique

banner ads generated that reflect your users current interests, and

which change automatically.


You see? That's "cool" *and* "useful". It may not be the best idea

in the world, but it only took me twenty seconds. I bet that you

and the  programmer would be able to come up with better, once you

showed him/her the general idea.


Sheesh. And I thought marketing people were supposed to understand what

makes people tick.


d.


  

 > John

 > 

 > http://www.thegoodbookguide.com 



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