I got a little reminder about walking in our customers' shoes this week. We ran a survey asking regular users about twelve Workspace functions and features, from ordering albums to hosting to shopping cart sales — how important they were to people, how often they used them in Workspace, and how easy they were to use.

The thing is we (OK, I) focused on how photographers experience Workspace, but not on how it works for your customers. That’s pretty bad, but in a sense understandable … because although at Queensberry we use Workspace heavily every day (in fact the entire Queensberry website is a Workspace site, including our product image galleries, our shopping cart and this blog), it’s been heavily customised and so we don’t personally use Workspace themes, for example.

So, out of sight, out of mind.

Things like that are a trap. Another example: We never see what people experience when they sign up (hey, we registered ages ago), but that’s the door all our new business comes through. Same with people ordering an album for the first time. It’s a breeze for us, but what about people using our album set-up screen for the first time?

Every business has problems like this. It’s often not easy to look through your customers' eyes, but as I’ve just been reminded, it's well worth doing.

Cheers
Ian

PS, the survey is still open if you’d like to take part. People been really helpful with their responses, and we’ll come back and ask different questions some time soon ;-)