Introducing New Tech

When you are wanting to create new technology for your clients to use it is best that you can create a good first experience for the users. As the person creating the new technology you have to keep these things in mind; understand where the user is coming from, what could go wrong, plan ahead, and use kindness in your execution. New tech can be a great thing to have, but if users hate it and don’t want to use the tech then it becomes useless. This is why new technology is more about the user experience then how good the technology is.

From some personal experience I can say how well the users can figure out and use the technology is most important. Recently I had a great encounter with one of Adobe Photoshop updates with the user interface, which put together some rich tool tips. Previously Photoshop tools could be confusing and hard to figure out what each one does. I would have to test some of the tools I didn’t understand and I would get frustrated at having to go through most of the tools to find the right one. In the update though they implemented a small pop-up video of how the tool works. All you had to do was hover you mouse over the tool and it would demonstrate how it works. This did a lot for me as a user, time was saved, understanding of the technology increased, and I had no more bad experiences. I can tell that the programmers considered both clients and how well the technology was when they incorporated the new update to Photoshop. Now the program is easier for new users to get what they need out of the software.

A different interaction that I have had was from a bakery website. The website did not entice me to continue looking through and want to come back whenever I wanted to order something. The whole theme of the website was offsetting and looked like it was just thrown together with out much thought on the user experience. I sometimes could not find what food items I was wanting. This made the company look unprofessional. The bakery is probably losing the opportunity for new customers and for some customers to want to come back. The company needs to update their website and keep it updated whenever they have changes to their menu. When planning the update, they should think about how easy website is to navigate and make sure customers can find things and order them without any inconvenience. If the company can incorporate these things onto the website well, they will have more traffic to the site and have more people give recommendations to use their bakery over other competition.

I know from experiences and reading the book that introducing new technology to clients is very important for the continuation of the clients. For clients to adopt the tech the people that create the tech have to do their best to think about how the users will react to the technology. Making sure that the users know help is available and easy to get. Users are usually fearful of the change. Your job is to make sure you communicate well on what the new product can do for them and ensure them that if problems arise that they will be solved in a timely manner and efficiently. The biggest things you want to make sure happens is that the clients don’t have any struggles with the tech, they feel in control, and that you show you care about them and what they do.