3 ways to make our customers’ lives easier (and ours too!)

June 16, 2015

Hi, my name is Dan Zola, I’m the new User Experience lead working the Bandwidth Dashboard. I’m working with the team to make the Bandwidth Dashboard easier to use – more clear for our customers.

I joined Bandwidth three months ago. One of my first tasks? Go meet with our customers. So I did. I packed my bags, flew out, and watched how our clients use the dashboard.

How do our customers log in?
How do our customers port numbers?
How do our customers order numbers?
How do our customers search?

Well I’m back. And I’ve learned 3 behaviors that our clients would like us to change in order to make the dashboard better and our client’s lives easier:

1. Kill the Jargon

We’re all guilty of it. We use telecom jargon & abbreviations and assume that our audience is in the know.

In Exception
Alternate SPID
Requested Supp
FOC

…We throw around these phrases without blinking an eye. But our customers are blinking – they are confused.

Inherently our customers don’t have the industry savvy that we have – that’s why they are coming to us – we shouldn’t alienate them with internal phraseology.

Sidebar

Think our telecom customers know these telecom phrases? Think again. Each one of the above phrases stumped at least one of customers I met with.

Just because something makes sense to Bandwidth, we can’t assume it makes sense to our customers.

2. Don’t offer everything. To everyone. At once.

Choose a cereal:

How long did that did that take you? I’m guessing not long. Maybe your favorite cereal is listed, maybe it’s not – but you made a choice, quickly.

Now try again:

Can you choose a cereal now? Of course you can. But not as quickly. Not as easily. What was once a nearly automatic reflex has turned into a laborious assessment.

Too much choice can have a deleterious effect on user action.

Customers now are thinking:

Have I considered all of my options?
What do all of these options mean?
Am I making the right choice?

The Bandwidth Dashboard has no shortage of terrific functionality. Our team has done a great job versioning a multitude of options. We just need to dole it out to our customer in smaller, more manageable increments.

Exposing all options puts a tremendous burden on the majority of our users.

Here’s why: The overwhelming majority of our users don’t require every option. Two or three choices will suit them just fine. Compounded with the first point (see above) that many users don’t understand all of these options – our customers are again confused. This confusion turns to apprehension and eventually leads to frustration.

Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as this:

3. Lead our customers through anticipatory design

We have a firm understanding of our clients. We have:

Years of relationship building
Google Analytics
Heatmaps
Usabilia feedback
Customer interviews

We know what the majority of our customers are most interested in.So let’s start there. Let’s empower our customers and give them what they want…faster.

Some practical examples:

Let’s promote the most popular ways to search for orders
Let’s default customers to their preferred subaccounts & locations
Let’s get clients to their telephone number inventory faster

In short…let’s anticipate our customers’ needs and reflect that in design.

So now, what?

Now we are moving forward. Our development team is already hard at work at making changes. We deliver to production in two-week sprints. So look for incremental improvements to the Bandwidth Dashboard beginning as early as this month!

The enhancements are influenced by key learnings: