what our customers want to get?

let's talk about what really matters

We are making preparation to start working on huge improvements in our's best selling product and one of the thing, that we recently done, was a revision through expectations which our's customers have.
We agreed it cannot be a features list, rather simple adjectives, generalities, not specifics, something which should be valid and important for any functionality that we want to add or improve, something which will be always true, at any time.

I believe that was pretty well invested time, even if each point on this list can looks like something really obvious (maybe even like a cliche?), but I think (and whole team agreed), that going through this list whenever change will come, can show us are we going in the right direction, before we start working on it.

In my opinion, the list which we created, can be useful not only for us, that's why I decided it would be worth to share the results. So let's see how this list look like?

what you want to have is what we want to deliver

• SAVE MONEY
  This point is the most important thing. There is not a single example of software, which was ordered and its main purpose wasn't saving the money. Of course it doesn't have to be direct impact, but time or effort saved on doing various things is nothing more, but money saving.
  
  That's why, whenever you will think next time on something new, which, as you assume, should be implemented and this feature is something that everyone want and need, you should consider if it will allow for saving time, effort or money.
  If won't, maybe this is not such a good idea to spend your time on this functionality?
  
  
• TRUST
  I know that trust is pretty wide concept, but this is important to base all our relations on trust. It doesn't matter do we talking about team members, teams, customers or company - without trust, communication between us will be a labor.
  
  If we won't care about trust, our customers won't believe that we care about them. That's why we need to show them, that everything what we are doing is for their good, that we want to solve their problems, that even if bug happen, we will fix it as soon as possible. And we won't ever treat them as enemies.
  
  Our's customers want to trust, want to have faith in us, but firstly we need to prove them, that we are worth these feelings.
  
  
• SIMPLICITY
  Whenever you are using something, one of your requirements is simplicity, you shouldn't be forced to went through tones of documentation to start using it (who even read those documentations? who has a time?). You don't want to participate in long trainings. Everything should be intuitive, it should be on right place whenever you want to use it.
  
  And even it will be to complicated, answer should be at your fingertips, you should get as much accurate help as you will need to.
  
  
• CLARITY
  Your product should be useful for your customers, but it won't be until not everything is clear for them.
  If user will see functionality, he should know what is the purpose of it. He shouldn't be confused and lost with software, which was created only to make his life easier. If he won't understand functionality, he will become frustrated and sometimes it can end with throwing application away.
  
  
• CONSISTENCY
  If you got similar features in few places, all of them should work more less in the same way, the names should be the same and after the same set of steps, you should get exactly the same result.
  You cannot use the same name for different things in different places, because it also leads to misunderstanding.
  
  You should focus on everything which can create doubts in understanding, everything what is potentialy misleading, and try to solve the problem, before it will have impact on usability.
  
  
• LESS CLICKING
  If first step, which your customer is doing after log in, is to go somewhere else, you can improve it, if he want to send an email to another user and email addresses are stored in application, you can create simple mailing tool. And so on.
  
  You need to find steps which your customers repeating day by day, because in many cases, there is a pattern in those steps, and if pattern exists, you can always automate the work or make it simpler.
  Your software will be more efficient and work of users of the application as well.

what to do with it?

This is simple - make sure that you won't forget about it. Or even more - we should always have in our minds each point from this list.

That's why I got clear plan for today, print this list for each team member and ask them to look at this piece of paper each time before they will start working on new story.

If you got any other points which would be worth to add, just write them in comments.