(Management)

To care or not to care…

I am not sure if this interests you:) I enjoy discovering new things and particularly the small/big ones that others don’t get to see.

I haven’t kept too many shortcuts on my desktop and hence I open programs like Winamp through Start Menu of Windows. Every time I go to open Winamp, it would look like this:

I always wondered why would ‘Uninstall Winamp’ appear at the top of the menu, and for accessing Winamp, I would have to bring the cursor down at the bottom. Why didn’t they design it in such a way that the main program that I want to open, i.e. Winamp appears on the top and other files like Uninstall, Read Me file, etc appear afterwards? Don’t you think it would be more user-friendly thing to do?

I went ahead to check how it works for some other programs. The case was the same for WinZip: to my surprise, Help Manual appears on the top, while WinZip 9.0 appears at the bottom of the menu!

Then I realised how it works. Windows keeps the items from top to bottom according to the Alphabetical Order. Hence ‘U’ninstall Winamp appears before ‘W’inamp, and ‘H’elp Manual appears before ‘W’inZip. But still, they could have done something to make it more convenient for users! They could have Written WinZip Help Manual instead of simple Help Manual, and that would have made sure that this file appears after WinZip!

When I checked with one other software – PictureProject, it was designed exactly as I had thought – all items in the menu are prefixed with PictureProject and hence the order is this: PictureProject, PictureProject Help, PictureProject ReadMe, and then PictureProject Uninstall! It takes care of the alphabetical order requirement and is just what the users want.

Why was it that Winamp and WinZip didn’t care to make it this way while PictureProject did? I guessed, just confirmed and there were no surprises: PictureProject is software from Nikon, Japan, while Winamp and WinZip are American products! (Winamp is from the US; Winzip is from Canada).

There is a concept called Quality Function Deployment – the motto is to incorporate the quality systems from the design step itself so as to avoid faulty production in the later stages. As we all know, the Japanese companies have excelled quality and taken it to benchmark status. And many American companies have been failing on this front.

Do you think my analysis was naïve and no one cares about such small-small things? :) First, such small things go a long way in customer orientation, and second, quality and customer satisfaction become very much part of our organisation culture – we lose focus once and it would take years for us to change. Taking care of such small things in the design stage is the success of products like iPod. Ideally there should be no limits to which designers and companies go create a product / service to delight customers, taking care of the minutest of the details…

(Rahul)