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The primary principle of customer-centered design is know your customers. Naviscent employs this primary principle by following three related principles: (1) keep the customers involved, (2) conduct rapid prototyping, and (3) evaluate your designs. Omitting any of these principles from your design processes is a major risk. Studies by the Standish Group International have attributed many of information technology’s frequent project failures to a lack of end-customer input.
Iterative design addresses this problem by calling for setting measurable goals and repeatedly refining and testing design prototypes with customers until the final design meets or surpasses those goals. Your goals can be high-level and strategic, such as increased customer satisfaction or increased sales. They can also be short-term and tactical, such as reduced time to find items or fewer mouse clicks to check out and complete a purchase.
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Fixing Errors While They’re Still Inexpensive and Easy to Fix
Why is it important to fix errors as early as possible? It has been well documented in many disciplines that fixing errors in the later phases of design can be expensive. The famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright said it best: “An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.” Clearly, using the wrecking bar and rebuilding is far more expensive than simply erasing and redesigning. In the realm of software development, a general rule of thumb is that errors cost about ten times more effort and money to fix late in the process than if they are caught in an earlier phase. Watts Humphrey and others in the field of software engineering have even documented costs on the order of a hundred to a thousand times more effort and money to fix problems after deployment.
Building the Right Site, and Building the Site Right
What kinds of mistakes are made on Web sites? This figure categorizes the problems by feature and implementation. The top right-hand quadrant shows the right feature but the wrong implementation. For example, a shopping cart is definitely the right feature for an e-commerce site, but it could have implementation problems that make it hard for customers to check out and finalize purchases. Iterative design and testing will help you discover these types of problems.
The bottom left-hand quadrant of the above figure shows the wrong feature but the right implementation. For example, providing extremely sophisticated search features for power users is not very useful if most of your customers cannot even understand the basic search capabilities.
The bottom right-hand quadrant shows the wrong feature and the wrong implementation—a design that is not useful and does not work correctly.
A good design process, like Naviscent’s Customer-Centered Design Process, will filter out most of these sorts of problems.
Ultimately, you want to be in the top left-hand quadrant, with the right features and the right implementations of those features. Iterative design helps push you toward the top left by getting constant feedback from customers about features and their implementation.
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