How to improve users lives when users & customers are not the same people
The apparent conflict between customer needs and user needs in B2B or Internal software can be frustrating. Sales often wants us to focus on the Customer’s needs, while every instinct in most designers’ body wants to focus on User needs. It’s easy — and quite tempting — to focus on one at the expense of the other, yet doing so is one of the quickest ways we create an “us vs them” mentality that can destroy our effectiveness and the ability to get value into either group’s hands. As designers, then, what are we supposed to do to help improve the lives of those who will actually be using our products? How can we collaborate with business leaders to make the outcome we all want a reality? Even though they can seem mutually exclusive, it is possible to improve both customer and user pain points at the same time.
Understanding the Customer vs User Conflict
In order to solve any problem, we first have to understand it. We need to develop empathy. That’s what user experience design is all about, right? So let’s apply that concept here.
First, it might help to define who the “customer” and “users” even are. A “customer” is essentially the purchaser. They are the one giving us money. A “user” is the person actually using the software or product we’re designing. In consumer software, those two roles are typically filled by the same person. In the Software as a Service (SaaS) model the purchaser and user are very frequently two different people.
This can create a problem. Often new projects and initiatives come from customer or partner requests. There will usually be a desired outcome from the request. Often in the business world this outcome and its corresponding success criteria might even be laid down in a Statement of Work (SOW) or Master Service Agreement (MSA). That SOW or MSA is then delivered to the Product team to execute on. All too often, a strict timeline is affixed without ever talking with Product, UX, or Engineering. Even more commonly, the SOW & MSA will be chocked full of lists of features instead of desired outcomes.
Let’s consider an example to help illustrate. Let’s say you work for a software company building home furnishing delivery route planning software. Your customer (home furnishing chain COO) wants you to help them increase deliveries per day. Yet when conducting contextual inquiry and ethnographic research you discover that the dispatchers have to go to 5 different screens during their journey. They also have no easy way to see where destinations are in relation to each other. Drivers have no way to reorder their routes when they’re totally crazy, making them zig zag across the city. The information that is provided to the drivers is the information the business stakeholders care about, not the driver. There are tons of problems with the driver app. You have experienced their pain. There is just so much you want to do to help them.
Yet when you, as the UX Designer, try to start solving these problems for your users you are told to stop worrying about the dispatchers or delivery drivers. You get push back from Sales or Business stakeholders. “The dispatchers and drivers aren’t paying our bills. Satisfying their needs isn’t the ‘value-add’ or ‘differentiator’ we’re getting paid to provide”, you’re told.
Every user-focused cell in your body revolts at this feedback. You know if you don’t make dispatchers’ and drivers’ jobs easier, you’ll never help the business achieve more deliveries per day. Yet the business just wants you to do what you’re told essentially.
What are you supposed to do about this conundrum?
Prioritizing User Needs
One of the problems with UXers, is that we’re idealists. We want to improve everyone’s life all at once. The first thing we have to internalize — is that:
‘Not now’, doesn’t mean ‘not ever’
We all have to realize that while it is absolutely true that solving user pain points results in increased sales, retention, and loyalty among our customers, it is also true that we can’t solve everything at once or even in the order we’d like. Very often, certain improvements do not match up with the objectives of the business right now. That is the reality of commercial design.
It is also important to note here that there is absolutely nothing wrong with designers building business cases for prioritizing improvements they see a need for and submitting them to management. Companies today need far more designers who do this. It is how we’re taken seriously and gain political capital in the future. When pitching business cases, however, it is important to frame it in business terms that business leaders can understand. To be effective, we must help them understand how doing X for Y users will help the company achieve its stated strategic initiative.
It’s also important to remember that until the pitched business case is “funded” and adopted as an official initiative, we have to be able to focus our creative juices on helping solve the problem we’ve been assigned.
The Answer
I have found that the key in all of this is in solving customer needs in a way that improves the users’ experience. There are usually many ways to achieve any desired outcome. You could focus 100% on the customer in which case you run the risk of alienating or frustrating your users. While it is true that in the SaaS world users are often “captive witnesses” (they are forced to use the software), if you frustrate enough users for long enough there will eventually be a mass revolt. I have seen it happen more than once.
We also, don’t want to focus so much on the user that we end up not solving the customer’s need very well. By focusing on the customer to identify the problem to solve and the user to figure out how to solve that, we please both groups which ends up being a major win for our company as well.
To illustrate how that can work, let’s get back to our example of the furniture delivery software. After understanding both the customer needs and the users’ pain, you identify that the biggest cause of the inefficiency isn’t the order in which drivers deliver the furniture or the information they’re given about each job, but rather it is the list of jobs they’re assigned in the first place. You decide to focus on helping the dispatcher have better visibility into the jobs in the queue and where each job is in relation to the others. You add a map where each job is plotted, & simplify the IA which improves the dispatchers’ effectiveness & efficiency which in turn increases the deliveries per day. You solved the CUSTOMER’s problem, but did it in a way that increased your USER’s experience.
There are opportunities to apply this concept at almost any company with any product. Scope your ingenuity and passion for improving users’ lives down to match the customer outcome. If you still get resistance, do some research to get data showing the correlation between the dispatcher’s pain and the sub-par outcomes the customers are experiencing. Show the business how focusing on users can help them achieve the outcome they’ve already established. This allows everyone to win, and shows your ability to be not just an order taker, but a thought leader also.
Have something to add? Need a product leader to help you deliver better outcomes, faster? Connect with me on LinkedIn to join the conversation or check out my portfolio to learn more about my work.
