You would never pick a half-price heart surgeon, my career ride from retail to technology

I’ve always found the question of ‘why’ customers make decisions absolutely fascinating. 

We consider 3 - 4 things when shopping for something. It might be cost, quality, how much we ‘trust’ it... How important each of those things are depends on the product. There are things that are important, and not important at all.

You make a customer’s decision easier when products are sorted in a way that resonates with their thinking. You will also completely put them off if you get it wrong.

For example, imagine if everything in a bookstore was sorted by colour. Or you walked into Bunnings and everything was ordered by price? Or, my favourite example, it’s highly unlikely you’d even consider going to a surgeon who was advertising themselves at half price. Cost just isn't at the top of the priority list.

Enter online shopping. 

When e-commerce first started, ‘usability’ just wasn't a thing. Tech things were built by tech people. Tech people know a lot about tech stuff, but don’t often know much about customers. So many times negotiating a website left me wanting to throw my laptop out the window before even getting to the checkout. And i realised why - we were building things without focusing enough on the people using them.

In a physical retail store, you have the chance to guide customers along the way. If someone looks lost, a shop assistant can interrupt them and offer to help. You can test, learn, and make changes. 

We were building expensive tech solutions without understanding what actually matters to customers. 

You can’t patch bad design with helpful staff online. One wrong assumption about how customers make decisions, and your beautiful new platform becomes a ghost town. I was hooked. So I transferred from the wide world of retail to the wild world of web.

Since then I’ve become known as a "Tech Translator" - the person who stops companies from building impressive-looking solutions that miss the mark on what customers actually need. Most of that work is facilitating between the jargon-filled world of tech language and the real-world needs of humans. Ensuring technology briefs meet customer problems and business needs; that tech experts can make informed technology decisions; and that we brief before we build.

That’s been my world for over 20 years’ in almost every industry you can imagine, in advertising and inside businesses made big and small.

Customer Experience (CX) and Usability (UX) are now common parts of a tech project. But we still forget their importance. There’s this weird automatic hand-off of ‘tech problems’ to ‘tech people.’ 

And that’s a problem, particularly now.

It used to be that getting this wrong just cost you money and customers. But now? With AI in the mix? The stakes are through the roof.

Here's your wake-up call: If your tech team is working in isolation, if your board isn't thinking strategically about customer experience,

if your business leaders are still treating tech as something you "hand over to the tech experts" - you're setting yourself up for failure.

And the key is you don’t need to understand tech to be part of it. What you do need to do is be part of the brief. And brief before you build.

The solution isn't more tech. It's better input. Better bridges between what's possible and what's actually needed.

Want to build something that works? Start with how your customers think, not with what your tech can do. Actually, just start with me.

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