suprised a customer today :)

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There's always lots of talk about how we incorrectly read customers body language and make them irate, and we cannot figure out why, but I have noticed occasionally that I have had the exact opposite happen. I have made customers happy, and cannot figure out why either. Here as some cases that came to mind. (Note: I own my own business, so there's no manager to complain to...I AM the manager!"

First instance happened this spring when I was over at a person's office repairing their signboard in their lobby. When I was nosing around in the back of the cabinet in a bunch of wires, the receptionist that works beside it made the comment " Wow, I wish I was that good at electronic stuff like that" My usual response to that is "Well, everybody has their own special talent that they are good at" I didn't even notice any "happy" body language when I said this, as I had my head buried in the cabinet, but she got rather quiet after I had said it. I thought I had offended her, but I received a call from her manager on my answering machine when I got back to the shop saying "I just wanted to thank you for the complement you gave my receptionist. You really made her day pleasant after you said what you did."

Another one happened earlier this week. I typically over-estimate people's technical abilities, and they sometimes get offended when I assume they can perform the most menial technical task without assistance. I have seen even something as simple as plugging in a device to a wall outlet can cause a complaint If I assume that the person can do it on their own. People even read assumptions into actions that I would never even think of. I commonly ship parts to customer's locations to save shipping costs and speed things up. I have had customers complain about this because they think they are expected to install the parts themselves. Well, I assumed again earlier by having some power supplies for a customer's mixing board shipped directly to their location. After I had made the part order, I assumed that the customer would call me to schedule a service call to come connect the power supplies when they came in. Nope! they called to say "Hey, thanks for sending the power supplies directly to us! That saved us some time because we plugged them in ourselves and they work great!" Again, the result was unintended, but positive nonetheless!

Anybody ever had one of these "nice" suprises!

A bit hard to discribe...but last week at work,I had turned a table around to make preparing meals more convenient.Previously,people had to run around the table as some things were stored on one side and other food on another side.This saved a lot of extra steps....but some one kept moving the table back to it's origiinal position .So,I decided it was a matter of them not understanding "why" I had moved the table and I wrote a detailed explaination of how it was more effecient and would save leg work.Two co-workers told me how much they appreciated it and said they never would have thought of it but it made perfect sense to change it this way as it would make the feeding much easier.

I often find little ways to help my coworkers and some do really appriciate it and "adopt" my way of helping each other.Thats a pretty good feeling.I also bring up changes that seem more logical(like keeping a list of dogs with diaria in the feeding station so people will know how much food they should be getting since we restrict their feeding to stop the diaria)Previously the only information was on the kennel doors where the feeding people didnt know about it until they got there to feed them and then had to dump out some of the food).Most of the things are very simple and logical.The only people who seem to have a problem with it are assistant managers who apparently think I am "usurping" their authority and the "lazy" staff who either take advantage of my being a hard worker(by just letting me do all their work while they chat to each other)or seem to resent my making them look lazier by cleaning 6 kennels to their 1.I really get annoyed by these kind of people.)

I'm not sure if I can recall an instance in which something like that has been unintentional on my part. (though these don't sound related to AS as compared to the instances that spring to mind for me in which I've unintentionally offended someone) ... I will say that when I'm doing programming work, a lot of my thought is focused on how to improve the user's experience of the software. This is something that a lot of programmers avoid doing. A lot of us (programmers) seem to prefer to just label the user as "stupid" and move on with the assumption that someone else will write a help file or some other kind of documentation or give them training to handle the system. I'm not pointing fingers at the programmers per se -- I do think it's kind of myopic of us -- although I realize everyone has their hangups and there's a kind of camaraderie in the whole "users are stupid" ethos, which makes it really inviting, even rewarding for programmers to adopt that attitude since that's how you benefit from the camaraderie. For my part however although there have been times that I've wondered why a particular interface was difficult for a user to grasp, I have for a while now seen that as the #1 priority in developing software. It's partly because of the very real frustration people experience with most software, although it's also because when you design something that really helps people get their job done faster and easier, they're really effusive about letting you know how much they love your software (similar to the feedback you described here). So in the long run it really pays to be very deliberate about designing things that are easy for the users, even though some of them do have trouble with very simple and conventional things like plugging something into the wall, because the majority of them become very loyal when you show that you can and will help them get things done.

I think also that my AS has helped me to be good at identifying better ways to design software as well, although I'm not sure if it's just because I'm so focused on doing that or if there's more to it. (Un)fortunately most of the software industry seems not to have really caught on to the idea that usability and human factors are probably the most important part of software development. On a couple of occasions when I've tried to have conversations about this sort of thing with other friends who're programmers, I seem to have been met mostly with the response that it's okay for software to be really just made for other programmers because nobody else really matters. It's (obviously?) something I'm fairly passionate about -- something I'd like to see change in the industry.

Sorry for being somewhat off-topic.

Me too. There weren't personal computers as I was growing up and I don't find using new software all that easy unless somebody has the patience to sit with me and show me what to do. To a degree, I can muddle along and sort it out but it gets very frustrating.

I think software developers need to realise that there is a significant proportion of the consumer base who didn't grow up with computers. Sometimes it seems to me that they make programmes very hard to comprehend when it just isn't necessary. Ditto with the people who make the various computer games which are virtually unwinnable.

If I can't win within a couple of weeks or so, I usually couldn't be bothered trying any more.

Well it's not just people who didn't grow up with computers. It's people in general. It's just like physical ergonomics except much more exaggerated -- most software makes a lot of assumptions about the user knowing certain things and/or wanting to do certain things... If you look at the button bar on any of the MS office applications as an example, there are dozens of different buttons there -- the average person will only ever use maybe 5 of those at best, because that's all they need. But the bar itself is cluttered with huge amounts of "garbage" because the folks creating the software think "I'd want to be able to do this, so it needs to be always available". So there's all this clutter of things you don't need sort of "in your face". Yes, you can "configure" the button bar, but configuring it generally requires dealing with yet another fairly unintuitive interface and the set of tools it has by default aren't generally the minimalist set of tools most people want. Then in addition to that, software frequently is very "tight lipped" with information that you would actually want. For example if you're looking at a project management program, frequently a given task will be assigned to a person and there may be any number of people using this program from different locations who may or may not know who that person is, but the system will only tell them "task x is assigned to Bob" even though it probably knows a) where Bob is b) his contact information c) what time it is where he's located, etc. but it's not giving any of that information out. Usually it doesn't even link to the contact information for Bob even if another part of the application manages that contact information (which it usually does) instead forcing you to a) know that contact information is available and b) go hunt for it and c) figure out what time it is where he's located for your own damn self. These are a couple of the big reasons that software is so frustrating -- being constantly bombarded by controls you don't need that take up space that could be used to provide information that's available but not being provided. A guy buy the name of Alan Cooper wrote a good layman's book about this and some related human-factors stuff called the Inmates Are Running the Asylum. There's a really good bit in the book specifically about ATM's and why it is that getting money at an ATM is often frustrating for people (even people who've grown up with computers) even though it should be dead simple.