After furnishing houses in three countries
over the past 12 years, I’ve bought more than my share of televisions over that
time. It’s football season in the US and, despite my preference for a different
brand, my local Costco rep and some promotional pricing convinced me to bring
home a 2019 model LG TV.
Love the specs, image quality, and the TV in general, but….
…it seems like some key parts
of the LG TV were not really tested.
By that, I don’t mean software unit tests. I’m sure that
they all passed. There are no functional errors.
There is something more important to software engineering than if automated tests pass or not. The user experience.
What I mean is that it seems that none of the LG product
managers, testers, or execs ever actually tried using the LG magic remote or
tried configuring the TV to an internet connection.
Why?
For most people, the remote *is* the user experience for a
TV.
The LG “magic remote” by default has a pointer with an icon that
appears on the screen and moves wherever the remote is pointed. The chaotic
movement is not only distracting, but also drives my cats crazy.
So I
tried to turn of the pointer feature. There is no option to turn the pointer
off in any of the menu options. I’d consider this to be a big miss on the part
of the product management team. There is a unpublished hack on the internet to “unregister”
the pointer feature…but the pointer automatically re-registers when the OK
button is clicked. As if the OK button isn’t a common button to click. So, it’s
only unregistered for a short amount of time until the remote is needed again.
The internet is filled with complaints. Not about the TV,
but about the remote. The user experience is so bad that if anyone on the dev,
test, or product management team had actually tried the remote, it likely would
not have shipped.
Or perhaps they did and that would be indicative of a worse
issue. That common disconnection between the software team and its users.
There is a good lesson here. Unit tests aren’t a measure of
the customer experience. You and your manual tests are.
You have skin in the game no matter your role.
The customer experience is a measure of how likely a
customer is to buy your product again. Or convince others to buy it. Because,
in most cases, you only get one swing of the bat with any customer.
What are those key features for your product?
You need to try those features that you ship, especially the security
features. It's the only way to know the customer experience. Do you really want to hinge your entire brand on a crappy key experience in one of those key features?
At least in my case, LG did. And their whole brand in my
eyes is the worse for it.
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updates: @Opinionatedsec1. Or, start your own discussion using
#crazygoodcyberteams on twitter or Linkedin and I'll read it.
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