Mind the gap: Keep the needs of both customers and users in mind

When designing an application, it is important to understand the difference between customers and users. Each role has its own goals, biases and perceptions that are important to consider. When your product works for both of these groups, your product has a bigger chance of success.

A customer is the person who makes the decision to buy a product. A user is the person who utilizes the product for their needs. This may not be the same person and the gap between customers and users can be very different depending on the product.

Consumer Products

In consumer products, the gap between the customer and user is practically non-existent. Often they are the same person or close enough to the other users to be able to assess their needs. For example:

• A college student decides to buy a time management application for her iPhone. In addition to reading about the features of the application, she decided to buy this product based on reviews posted by people who purchased this application. She is both a user and customer of this product.
• A husband and wife decide to buy a new flat screen television for their family. Together they are both customers of the product and two of the users. Their five-year old son is also one of the users, but he is not involved with the buying decision. The couple investigated the different televisions available on the market and chose a set based on the features available, reviews in Consumer Reports, recommendations from friends and family, and cost. When making this decision, they kept their needs and their son’s needs in mind.
• A woman reads the New York Times every day on the Internet. She is a user of this service but currently does not pay to get access to the articles she reads on the website and therefore is not a customer. When the New York Times starts charging for more of their material in January 2011 (as they recently announced), she may decide to pay for this service because it holds value for her. She would be classified as both a user and a customer at this point.

In these examples, it’s clear that by pleasing the user you are also pleasing the customer and will reap the benefits of making the person with purchasing power happy. If the customer is not satisfied with the user experience of the product, they may choose to stop using the product or even return the product to get a refund. In the case of the family purchasing a television, if they find the television hard to set up or use, they could decide to return the set and may tell others about their negative experience with that brand. Similarly, if the woman who purchased the online newspaper subscription no longer finds the content compelling, she may choose to stop paying for access to the website.

Business Products

With business applications, the difference between users and customers is usually more distinctive. Sometimes customers are also users of the product, but more often customers and users are different persons with different needs for the product. Here are some examples:

• A human resources director chooses to purchase access to an online time tracking service for his firm to use for keeping track of employee absences and hours. Everyone in the company, including him, will be using this application to keep track of their time out of the office. All of the company executives will be using the reporting piece of the website. In this case, he is both a user and customer of this product.
• A sales manager for a computer manufacturer wants to have an application that helps his team sell and configure machines for his customers. He has done some research on the products out there and he decided that he prefers to have the in-house IT department build an application tailored to his team. In this example, he is the customer of the IT department and therefore the customer of the application. He will consume some reports produced by the application, but otherwise he is not a user of the software.
• An executive decides to buy a new hardware and software system for her call center employees to use. She is a customer of this product, but is not one of the users. She has an understanding of the basic process followed by the call center employees and works with some of the managers on her team to analyze what product to buy. She will not be a user of the system at all and will rely on her managers to deliver her updates on the use of the new application and provide her reports on the status of their teams.

Sometimes, as with the example of the human resources director, the customer is also one of the users of the product. For the features of the product he plans to use, he will be able to better understand the needs of users when making decisions. He will still need help in learning more about what is needed by all users of the application, because it’s not possible for him to have a thorough understanding of all of the needs of the different divisions in his company.

It’s more common that the customer of a business application does not use the product or will only use a portion of it.

In the case of the call center director, she wants to buy a product that fits the needs of her business and is cost-effective. When evaluating the hardware and software, she may gather feedback from lower-level managers and subject area experts. But she may neglect to talk to the real users of the system to help her make her decision and will only have a partial picture of the users.

In the sales manager example, he is not a user of the majority of the system. He may dictate some of the requirements of the application based on his knowledge of how he wants the business process for his group to work, but he might not adequately investigate the needs of the sales people who will use the majority of the new application.

In these two examples, keeping the needs of both groups in the forefront is crucial to the product’s success. Stakeholders may want to focus on the customers with the buying power, but if user needs are not met the product will not be successful in the long term.

Care should be taken to learn more about the context of use and users’ tasks. Missing user needs can lead to slower processes, decreased user adoption, increased training and maintenance costs, and diminish the reputation of the software provider. Furthermore, business products usually cost significantly more than consumer products and, if the product turns out to be unusable for end users, the costs to fix these problems are considerable. If a user is unsatisfied with one of these products, they cannot return it for a refund.

If the call center application requires users to input everything in the application via mouse compared to their current quicker and preferred keyboard data entry method, users will be more hesitant to use the newer application and the call center may become less efficient. Designing the application to take this preference into account could result in an application that directly supports keyboard entry, has streamlined navigation and, therefore, leads to increased user adoption and process efficiencies.

When designing a product, remember to keep the gap between customers and users in mind. Are your customers and users the same people? Or are there some important distinctions between these groups that you should consider? Thoroughly answering these questions is important to ensuring the success of your product.