How does emerging tech affect your customer
Jimmie Singleton
This month’s theme is emerging tech, which is something I am sure we can all get excited about! As technologists, we love getting to play with new tech and hopefully install it if we feel it good for our use case. Sometimes though, we get caught up in installing the coolest tech that we forget to think about our customers. Last month I discussed working to not exclude your user and to intentionally solicit feedback from them about the technology and the service. Since we know how to solicit that feedback and include our user, let’s talk about how customers may react to emerging tech.
What kind of user do you have?
I am sure many of you have that professor that just wants to show up and use a chalkboard to teach their students. As technologists, we are always looking for the best way to digitize that chalkboard, but when we try what normally happens? We get told by the faculty that they are not looking to digitize their chalkboard. So how do we find the balance?
A tech manager’s responsibility is to find solutions for issues and to create a better experience for the user with technology. That sounds simple enough and seems like it would be easy to implement in an ideal world where everyone is willing to change their teaching style to match our solutions. Because this is not the case though, we must find a way to implement technology that blends in with the classroom. In a classroom situation, the best technology experience a user can have is one that they barely remember. Not for the fact that the technology wasn’t amazing, but un-memorable because it was so easy to use it didn’t feel much different from normal teaching.
This all comes down to the type of user you have as well as the environment. I would argue in live events, the technology should make for an extremely memorable experience but in the classroom, it’s a different story.
Shiny Tech is cool but does it serve the purpose?
We often get caught up in the excitement of new technology and do not always look at the practicality. I always find it interesting when I go on a campus tour and I get taken to the room with the most tech. This is fun and all but does not provide me any insight into what the user is using on a daily basis. The room with 6 projectors, a video wall, and Dolby Atmos fulfills all of my tech fantasies, but how often does a professor actually use every capability of that room? Probably never. What we should be focusing on are the general use classrooms that have the widest variety of users with the bare minimum technology. What are those spaces missing and what emerging technology could we be using to make those experiences better.