Thursday, April 10, 2008

Microsoft makes good - A User Experience Story

So I started my day today by firing up my XBox 360 only to find 3 red blinking lights in the Ring of Light". Now, hardware is not my specialty, but I immediately knew this couldn't be a good sign. And, since I had my original XBox suffer a similar fate I was fairly irritated all day. Since I didn't have time to call customer support this morning, I had to wait til 10:45 at night to call about it. Of course I know it is a year and a half old so I am probably out of luck, but why not give it a shot?

So after a 10 minute phone call with an unusually helpful customer support tech, I was told that it is most likely a hardware failure but Microsoft is extending the warranty and fixing this kind of thing for free.

You could argue that, the thing shouldn't have broken in the first place and I would agree. But this post is more about how a user's perception of a product and a company can be influenced by all aspects of the user experience, not just the product itself. It isn't only about how easy it is to accomplish a task. It is about fulfilling users' needs. Usually these needs can easily be described as goals, such as "I want to play a game" or "I want to watch a DVD". However, there is another type of goal which is often forgotten since it isn't related to the task at hand. Regardless of the product in question, it is always a user goal to "not feel stupid". This type of "feeling" goal is important. In the case of Microsoft's XBox support "product", it is very important that the user not feel stupid or not feel unimportant.

If I look back at my experience, I very quickly went from feeling irritated and angry (when I thought I was gonna be screwed) to feeling very satisfied, despite the fact that I can't play my XBox for probably a couple of weeks.

So, kudos to Microsoft in this case... but don't think I'm not keeping an eye on you

4 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Looking wow gold for thrilling weapons, wow gold items and new pets? Beating wow gold the more powerful and wow gold 5000 crueler giants? Becoming the cheers of your clanbuy wow gold 5000and impressing your friends? wow gold All in http://www.masswowgold.com, We are the wow gold best alliance of the online wow goldgame players! We have: 24×7 online wow gold support;50,000+ registered users;10,000+ Paypalcheap WOW goldreputations;4 years professional service provider;We get wow gold gold from the players cheap WOW gold who do not need them any more or wow gold 5000 collect them from the direct cheap WOW gold gold farmers with wow gold lower price. Now the sell wow gold WOW gold is under big promotion. sell wow gold Registered Member will get 10% bonus.wow gold 5000 Most of the orders can be completedv sell wow gold in 3 hours. And we will give our customers the extra 5% gold if wow gold 5000 we can not complete the order in cheap WOW gold 24 hours.We deliver cheap WOW gold the gold by sell wow gold face-to-face trade wow gold 5000 in game only. Full refund will be warranted if wow gold 5000 we can not complete the cheap WOW gold orders in cheap WOW gold time.

BUY WOW GOLD said...

Good posting!