Lesson in Product Upgrades at a Home Improvement Center
Software is not the only thing that gets changed with scant attention to prior art. Even staid and tangible products can confuse established users when replacement time comes.
There’s very little high tech about shop vacuums. Their basic design has been around for years, and they are simplicity itself to use. Just plug them in and turn on the power switch. The number of decisions to be made in using one very limited, mainly in choosing from a very small set of possible attachments.
Shop vacuums do require maintenance, which is also very simple, helped along by having only two tasks. Emptying the drum, ideally after every use, is one maintenance task that doesn’t require much thought or planning. Replacing the filter periodically is another task that is very straightforward.
Until, that is, the filter manufacturer of the filters decides to change the design, for reasons that make eminent and complete sense that are not known or understood by established customers. In this case the new filter looks different from the old filter, and at first glance doesn’t seem like it will fit where it had been installed. The confusion is compounded, again in this case, by the fact the new filter’s part number on package is the same as the old filter’s.
Anyone in sales can tell you that confusion results in no sale, but I’d already purchased the filter. Taking it back would have been an option, but I didn’t know what to get to replace the replacement. The staff at the local home improvement center is always helpful, but don’t always have any product knowledge depth. Contemplating having to buy a new shop vacuum because the old one’s filters are no longer available doesn’t help when the shop vacuum cannot be used when I want to use it, which was right there and then.
So the range of experience went from puzzlement, to confusion, followed by incipient anger. The rational self kicked in when I realized that searching for a solution in hand may be quicker that going back to the home improvement center and then into the unknown. This last experiential element had a touch of entrapment.
It took maybe ten minutes of playing around, trying to find a way to install the new filter into the cage that easily accommodated a long line of old filters, but I eventually stumbled on a conformal solution. Knowledge gained stored away, for use against the next time this happens.
Probably not much can be done by shop vacuum filter manufacturers can do to help customers who still have filters from a previous design. Software products can avoid this with trivial effort, relative to their upgrades that can leave a lot of users in confusion and more than incipient anger. The reason for this is simple: Their developers have a complete knowledge of their own prior art, and can warn the user accordingly.
Which does bring up one final point: Why are customers who own software called users, and not customers? After all, ‘customers’ are real and tangible, while ‘users’ are an abstraction without flesh and emotions.
© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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