Give Me Your Huddled Masses...

When I do usability work, it's astonishing how often a client won't give me access to their user base. They're so used to protecting that base that they can't immediately swing their thinking around to working with that base, rather than just wining and dining them. Sales personnel are the most protective, in my experience. They seem to live in terror that somebody will screw up the precarious relationship they have with their customers. Even when I get to customers, I'm usually given only a small number of very carefully selected and primed representatives, and sometimes not the right people within the customer organizations.

The excuses are legion - customers are too busy, they're too far away, the right people aren't available. But perhaps the most ironic is the excuse that I'll raise customer expectations by letting them think that their wishes will become features in the next release, and if they aren't then the customers will get crabby and disappointed. A lot of salespeople leave me with the impression that their customers are generally vocal and upset about something, interspersed with short interludes of grumpy acceptance. The salesperson doesn't want that sleeping dog disturbed by the slightest zephyr.

But what they can't seem to get straight is that I'm not after user wishes; I'm after user processes. I'm not going to talk much about desires, but about business. I'm trying to understand how customers operate. They'll tell me their desires, of course, but I'm always careful to be noncommittal, with comments like "I'll see what I can do about that in the design, but it may have to be in version two".

Letting users into the planning and design stages is good business, and establishes a level of trust that can't be won any other way. Now if I can just make clients see that...