Helping your Products Pass the "midnight Test"

Imagining how our customers might want -- or need -- to use our products and services helps us create offerings that will help them succeed in many situations and circumstances.

Whether you are developing a product or service for mass consumption, or creating a customized solution for a client, imagining how your audiences will consume your material can make all the difference between their success and failure.

This article discusses ways to predict circumstances of use, and why it's so important to anticipate the possible consequences and ripple effects of your customers' potential inability to succeed.

For example, if people cannot consume your products and services properly, will they simply be frustrated or delayed, or could they also be at risk for losing their own clients, customers, profitability, credibility, respect, health, safety, or other vital outcomes?

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What Are Examples of "Routine" Circumstances of Use?
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Routine circumstances involve the range of normal or typical modes in which people would consume your offerings. These might occur during the day, in perfectly sunny, non-stressful conditions, with access to plenty of help and support in case anything goes awry. These situations might occur:

-- At home or in one's personal life
-- In the office or in one's professional life
-- At school or in a similar learning situation
-- Traveling by foot, in a car, or on a train, subway, bus, plane, or van
-- Exercising, such as when walking the dog, bicycling, or jogging

You can support people's routine circumstances by providing multiple delivery modes -- such as print, Web, audio, and video -- that cater to different learning styles and situations in which customers might use your products.

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What Are Examples of "Non-Routine" Circumstances?
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Non-routine circumstances are the abnormal, unusual, or even extreme conditions under which people might need to interact with any of your products, information, systems, or services, including:

-- High-risk or non-optimal scenarios, such as during power outages or fluctuations, using incorrect tools, with insufficient resources or training, or with a substandard infrastructure.

-- Difficult or remote situations, such as in inclement weather, off-hours, or in isolated locations, when it would be hard to address customer concerns or provide assistance if something failed. These include situations in which customers might be working late into the night. They might realize at midnight, for instance, that they can't complete a critical step in a process, or need some other kind of fundamental help with your product.

So, in non-ideal situations such as these, how would your products and services respond? Would they be able to complete the action flawlessly, or, almost as ideally, halt the action intelligently and harmlessly and let your customers know what to do next?

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How Can You Make Your Offerings More Bulletproof?
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-- Comb your "lessons learned" database from your past projects or research your customer records to determine whether you need to make improvements in any area.

-- Once you think you have "perfected" your offerings, test them with real or representative customers and observe just how well people can interact with them without your providing assistance. These tests will help you determine just how usable and self-explanatory your products and services are, and how they would respond in a variety of different situations.

If you ensure that your offerings are bug-free and can function properly under a range of possible circumstances, you will prevent the aggravating headaches that could send your audiences running for the door.

This approach can help you design more ideal routine user experiences, while also avoiding the risks of producing unhappy customers because you've overlooked the non-routine situations.

In conclusion, whether you're developing a basic "how-to" guide or a complex business system, ask yourself: Can it pass the "midnight test"? Until you can imagine your audiences successfully using the product, information, system, or service in the middle of the night, in isolated conditions, with no help available of any kind, then it's simply not ready for prime time!