A Great Example of A Terrible User Experience!- Introduction (part 1)

As an expansion stage venture capitalist who strongly believes in companies developing great user experiences, I spend a lot of time designing and redesigning experiences in my head every day. For example,

– When I use a website, I redesign the experience in my head, mostly redesigning the UI to its simplest form.

– As venture capital advisors to our portfolio companies, we both use the products that our portfolio companies create and we give them feedback on the user experience.

– When I stand in lines with multiple cash registers and multiple queues, I redesign the lines in my head to create a single line (so that the customers are not frustrated when they get in a slow line).

– When I get stuck in a line at a toll booth, I think through what the state needs to do to have transponders as part of vehicle registration and how we should not have toll booths any longer.

In general, I have a really strong belief that a differentiated and valuable user experience is the single most important factor driving business growth strategies. Because of this belief, when I get a great experience, I notice (and sometimes even blog about it) and when I get bad experiences, I tend to redesign them in my head and then complain about them a lot.

This series of blog posts comes from a really bad series of user experiences and one really nice TSA agent at Logan Airport. The net result from my experiences is that I renewed my driver’s license after spending a lot of time being frustrated, redesigning (in my head) the experience offered by a number of organizations, and wondering why any of a number of organizations didn’t address a seemingly common issue…any of them could have improved my user experience, but none of them did.

I am writing about the experience not to complain about the RMV, but rather to point out how bad experiences effect people and to encourage you to really push your product and development teams, sales support and marketing teams, and customer service teams to really understand how their touch points with the users, buyers, and other market participants are perceived and, even better, how they could redesign the touch points and experiences to drive a much more positive perception!