Day: September 25, 2005

An Interesting Blog

One of the Blogs I consistently find thought provoking and entertaining to read is Creating Passionate Users.She has two recent postings that certainly resonated with me.

The first includes a "little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies." I think I’ll print it out and post it on my wall at work.I found it inspiring. The posting especially works for me  because I work in a company that really does care about our users and it takes individuals to make that happen.

The second post is titled " The worst way to calm someone down."  I recently called  a credit card company that makes lots of money off college students. They give a student a credit card with a $500 limit. Then they make it very easy for the student to go over the credit limit by $10.  Finally they charge a $35 fee for going over the credit limit. Now don’t get me wrong I know that it is the student’s job to stay under their credit limit but it bugs me that this is  is so damn lucrative for this credit card company (CitiBank). One of the reasons these companies offer so many credit cards to students is that they can bilk them out of so much money.

When I called Citibank to complain  I experienced exactly what the Creating passionate Users blog describes. The person was maddeningly calm and uninterested. She made it very clear that our business was  totally unimportant to Citibank and that  she could care less. If she had mirrored my outrage just a little bit or even just acknowledged it I might not have been quite so inclined to stop doing business with CitiBank at all. She was totally in the right but boy oh boy did she make me angry. I walked away being absolutely clear that they could care less about my business. Oh well…..

Demonstrating PortfolioMinder

I got back last Sunday from the Financial Planning Association Conference in San Diego. We previewed PortfolioMinder
at the conference. It was a huge success! I am going to be the Customer Care Manager for  PortfolioMinder which is new software from Intuit for independent financial advisers. There was a phenomenal amount
of interest for PortfolioMinder at the show. I’ve never done so many demos in all my life. There were 5
of us demonstrating PortfolioMinder for three days and we were busy almost all the
time.

Here is a picture of the booth and the team doing demos.
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It really is fun to work on the launch of a new product. There is so much to do. This week in addition to lots of other stuff I helped set up and run three research sessions. In each one we talked to an adviser about his or her software purchase process. We used WebEx to virtually watch over the adviser’s shoulder while he or she used our marketing web site. It is interesting how some people just look at the screen shots and hardly read any of the text and others read all the text especially the FAQs.

We also have done research sessions with advisers who are using PortfolioMinder to see what works and what doesn’t work for them when they use the product.  I haven’t been able to attend one of the product research sessions yet but I’m looking forward to attending some soon. Intuit is well Known for its follow me home method of studying the user experience. I can really see how easy it would be to not do user experience research because there just doesn’t seem to be time in the middle of developing and  launching a product, but I  can also see why having done the research will make a big difference in the end product we release.