When it comes to Apple launching a new product, there seems to be a bit of a pattern emerging amongst tech bloggers and their readers. During the build-up to the event, there is loads of excited discussion about what is going to be announced.
During the event the journalists who are attending live blog or tweet with varying degrees of enthusiasm about what is being launched. After the event, the comments increasingly become jaded and the discussion moves on to whether Apple has lost its mojo and needs to launch in to a new product category.
Apple is one of the world?s most valuable companies, it has huge cash reserves, and it dominates most of the markets it is in. To general consumers, Apple is doing a fine job and there are few businesses that wouldn?t aspire to achieve what Apple is doing.
I would argue that the biggest reason the tech bloggers have become pessimistic towards Apple?s current product strategy is they have become too close to the subject. They think and write about it every day, and they are mixing up their desire for something fresh to engage with, with what Apple should do as a business.
As a website owner, it is very easy to become too close to the subject at hand and fail to notice important issues that need your attention. Over familiarity with the way your website works makes you blind to dead ends and unintuitive processes.
Fresh eyes
One of the tasks we set new team members here at Heart Internet is to buy one of our products and make notes on their experience. Was all the information they needed there, was it clear where the order buttons are, were there any points where you were unsure what to do etc.?
Because we work with the website every day, we know how it works and it makes complete sense to us at all times. However, a new team member has the unique insight only fresh eyes can give us, so we use it to our advantage.
Testing products
This is also true when it comes to the products themselves. We create them and their control panels, so the user interface and performance logic makes total sense to us. It is only when we ask our beta tester customers to use it do we realise some things may need tweaking or making clearer.
This is true of any company that makes products, both offline and online. Get people to test, because you can guarantee they?ll interact with your product in a way you never thought of.
Communicating
Continuing this theme, it can also be very easy to presume people know a feature exists or why a decision was made simply because you do. A great example from our perspective is the recent discontinuation of the website submission form in eXtend (we blogged about that here).
On every level it made perfect sense to remove it, however because we were so close to these reasons, we didn?t communicate them effectively. This resulted in a lot of misunderstanding that we then needed to correct through the blog. The lesson learned here is to never presume knowledge on a customer?s part. They don?t work with or for you, and they aren?t privy to the decision making process.
Finding what works for you
There are companies out there who will be able to do this type of testing for you, but you can go along way by doing certain things yourself. If you have a good sized custoemr base, invite a handful to become beta testers of any new control panels, interfaces, web sites or products. If you don?t want to expose new ideas to customers, there are always friends and family to fall back on. When you have been working on something in detail over an extended period of time, fresh eyes are essential.
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Source: http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/blog/2012/11/taking-a-step-back-to-move-forward/
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