"From the very start, e-commerce has empowered the customer to an unprecedented degree...
If the customer is in the driving seat, the logical next step is to rethink everything from that perspective."
Electronic commerce, 2000 Special Report on the Financial Industry
CAP GEMINI, ERNST & YOUNG
  

Susan Harkus
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A critical perspective missed
The real business need of three tax agents

User-centred architectures + content & communications that engage
=> Business outcomes

A user agenda is always in play

Adapted from The User Experience, The iceberg analogy of usability, Dick Berry, User Experience Design, IBM Ease of Use team

Users know what they want to do. They just don't realise how much their decisions and behaviour are triggered by their sub-conscious agenda.

A user agenda is specific to the task  and any number of people from different demographics or social backgrounds will share the same set of agenda triggers for a particular task.

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This is a true story.

Only the names of the people and government department involved have been changed to protect the innocent and the foolish.

Not long ago...

In very recent times, the Internal Revenue Department of an unnamed country decided to move as much taxation paperwork as possible to their clients, in particular, to their tax agents and individual taxpayers.

The Department recognised that they had a duty to support compliance by clients and wanted to deliver that support through online channels such as email, internets and extranets.

Driven by a great desire to deliver VALUE to clients, they embarked on a 'Listening to Users' program, commissioning a tribe of consultants to conduct many, many, MANY focus groups across the length and breadth of the land.

A problem they could fix!

The tax agents they talked to had a real problem. Their clients used the agents' services to prepare their tax returns but the agents weren't always aware of the payments their clients made to the Department.

Had they made tax payments? Had they paid their value added tax liabilities?

The solution

The Department was delighted. Of course that information could be made available.

They implemented a system that maintained up-to-date pdf documents listing all the payments that all the clients of each tax agent had made. An agent could download their file at any time.

BUT... how did the tax agent know that the last pdf downloaded had the latest information on a particular client? It was easier to ring up the service line and do paperwork as they sat on hold rather than constantly download large files for a single inquiry.

Fix #1

The pdf was abolished. Tax agents could login to the extranet, search for a client and lookup the required transaction data.

Tax agents now logged on to use the system but with use came the next problem. Agents could see what their clients were paying the Department but had no idea what the payment was. A tax payment? A value added tax payment?

Fix #2... and success

The 'Listening' continued, descriptions were added to transaction amounts and after many months, tax agents had a service that gave them value.

A tale of three tax agents - consequences of the fix and fix again cycle

I was told this story by three different tax agents.

Blaise told me about the service when I asked him if he had used the tax agent extranet. "I really want client transaction history but that involves downloading pdfs of all my clients when I'm just doing a single client lookup. Total waste of time. I don't use the service."

I asked Claude what she thought of the pdf solution and she looked surprised. "What pdf solution? You just login and lookup a particular client's details. It's useless though. You just see a list of payment amounts. You have no idea what the amounts are for. I don't use the service at all."

Claude told me that one agent in her office used the service and thought it was OK - much to her surprise. I asked her to find out why Jipé used the service. And the answer was... because he could lookup a particular client and get the information he needed!

You only have one chance...

Because of my investigations, Blaise and Claude discovered 'fix #2'.

WITHOUT my probing, both would have continued to ignore what they considered a no-value service.

Users don't usually return to your software or websites to check the results of your fix and fix again cycle. You need to deliver their value proposition the first time around.

Why a fix and fix again cycle?

The puzzling aspect of this saga of wasted time and rework is why the value proposition took so long to discover.

We know that the Department mined the knowledge of users1 but users don't THINK ABOUT what they do. At the same time, we know that the Department would have known how tax agents 'do their business'.

WHY, in DESIGNING the extranet service, did the Department set aside THEIR knowledge of the 'whole task'?

A version of this story was published in 2004 in the CIDM e-newsletter.
Solutions Must Deliver Outcomes to the User Context [pdf 56Kb]

Talk to me

Ask me how to leverage YOUR 'whole task' knowledge of client and customer activities to avoid following an iterative fix and fix again development cycle.

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  1. First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 5, 2001

© Susan Harkus 2009

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