The expression is You can only make a first impression once and it, logically, is true. What it doesn’t take into account then are the in fact a lot of different first impressions.

The first first impression is during the pre-sales cycle. You need to make sure that your product is nicely showcased on your web site, the screencasts are professional and on-topic, etc.. You want to motivate people to pick up the phone and get more information. The classic way of testing this is through A/B testing and there are starting to be lots of services starting to fill out this area.

The next first impression is during the actual sales cycle as usually it is a different person (especially in organizations) that needs to make the actual decision on whether to purchase the product. This first impression is a complete red herring. Sales guys are trained in the art of manipulating the opinion of people they are selling to. That is their job. As a consumer, don’t believe their carefully scripted demo. Its carefully scripted. Make them demo on your product. As a co-worker of the sales team, make sure that they have a script and that your product absolutely works through that script and the obvious minor deviations that are likely to occur in it.

The third first impression is the one that motivated this post and that is when the customer has already paid their money and is starting to use the product. Or even earlier; when they are (trying) to install the product.

Make sure your install documentation is accurate, complete and usable

Here are some of the yaks I had to shave trying to install a pricey, enterprisey application. All of which could have been prevented with well tested documentation.

  • Had ‘recommended’ system requirements, but not ‘minimum’. That stumped me for over a day as I tried to configure things correctly in the VM. (It was recycled hardware.)
  • Had instructions for VMWare Server 1.x, but I had 2.x so skipped those instructions. By putting a version number in the section header you imply it is for that version not that product. Because of that I got road-blocked immediately after solving the first problem

  • Once the system was running, it wanted the license key. First, don’t make me type in a 40 character key in the console, but even if you are going to do that, don’t send it to me like this:

    vA1500- 1234578-ABCDEFGH-1234578-ABCDEFGH-1234578

    Spot the problem? The key sections are delineated with -‘s, but they give the product description followed by a – then the key. In an email with variable-width font’s that is hard to see. Products with GUI installers could get away with this as it would typically have 5 fields that each have 8 characters only, but when you are in a linux console, this obvious bit of UI is not available.

Of course, a positive second impression can sometimes replace a negative first one. The support response for this particular product was both swift and spot on in their diagnosis of the problem.

But that could also be a sign that lots of other people have had the same problems and answering those questions is routine. Which is a pretty huge smell that something is broken somewhere.