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Usability from the Customer's POV

There is a professional User Experience email group, and every so often, someone posts a cautionary tale.  It is usually a story of the significance of usability, as reported in a failure to act on recommendations. 

 I am quoting it, but leaving out the author's name, unless I have her permission.  Company names are always best left out as well, non-disclosure being what it is.   The story itself is common enough that most UX people I know have at least one experience like this in their past.  

 This is included here for those of you who might be working on a product OF ANY KIND and who ignore the UX people and/or initial warning signs that things are "clunky".  I have seen this over and over again in the Usability Field.  A MAJOR disconnect between the companies who create product and their actual market. 

 There's a push to add "UX" to everyone's job title, UX Developer, UX Designer, UX Architect.  The actual UX piece of it-talking to USERS, is the most likely to get pushed to the bottom under the crunch of a deadline or the guise of "productivity".  The idea of creating something and getting it out there, with the idea of fixing it later. Fine, do your first round of UX testing as your first rollout and see how much you fail.  Just make sure you get around to fixing the actual problems.  (Or maybe spend a little extra time fixing what you already know you can!)

 As promised, here is an actual experience from the field: 

 "Several months ago, I conducted an "initial experience" test of a
product. In my presentation of test results, I said there were a lot
of minor usability issues that, when put together, made for a clunky
initial experience. None of those issues have been fixed. (That
problem is its own story dealing with organizational politics.)

 Yesterday, I started calling customers of this product to find out how
things were going. The very first woman I talked to basically said she
was ready to find a different product due to usability issues.

 ....

 The thought from management at the time was, "It does
the function that people need." Then, complaints from support starting
coming in. Some issues were usability related, while others were
technical; that is, the feature simply didn't do what it was supposed
to in some cases.
....

 Users now expect products to be usable. It's not a
nice-to-have anymore, at least within our target market."

 Due to politics, some known issues were't fixed, a new one was discovered (UX testing can't predict actual usage in the real world-which is why follow up testing is important) and users just don't have patience with clunky products anymore.

 Ideally, UX is about sorting through the politics for the benefit of the user.  Business needs to not only get on board, but leverage this.  There are companies who have progressed & matured to this level of understanding; it's a trend of success.

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