Divining What Your Customers Want

Sometimes you have to read the minds of your customers.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working with one of the managers on developing a snapshot report requested by the customer, except we can’t seem to know what they really want. They seem to change their minds each week. I’m not in the meetings when they are discussing the snapshot report, but I’m not sure I would be able to figure out what they want, even if I was there.

It sounds like there are more than one person in the room, so each is going to want a different piece of the information – kind of like each wants to look at a specific and different part of an elephant. If each is responsible for a specific part of the job, then each will have different goals and those goals drive different report requests. And then there are phrases describing what they want to see – you could interpret the phrases in multiple ways. I think those phrases are causing misunderstandings in the report.

Last week I did another iteration of the report, and so far, I divined three different interpretation of a specific phrase. I decided to show all three interpretations. The manager confirmed that at least two of the interpretations were desired and the third was left in as a just in case. The third interpretation was a bigger picture item. At the same time that I’m revising the report and adding in new changes and taking out what I think was no longer needed, I’m trying to keep the report to one page and maintain large enough type size for legibility purposes.

If I knew more of where they were going, I might be able to design a report that would get close to what they need. For right now, I will just have to keep iterating.