When working on a product, user experience has become a priority. How a person interacts with a product, how useful it is, and how their experience using it is, ends up getting a lot of attention because it will affect their satisfaction and if they keep using it.
The focus is usually put on external end-users, the people using the product who aren’t part of the company making it. They are the measurement of a product’s success. But in most products, there are other types of users.
The first type of users are the creators of the product: designers, developers, product managers… In order to work on a product they necessarily interact with it. But they also may have conflicting interests with end-users, because something that will make the product easier to use may be difficult or expensive to develop. This is why user experience as a discipline exists in the first place. These users are in control, so they can balance both interests.
There’s another type of user: internal end-users; people in the company that makes the product who use the product but don’t participate in its development, like content creators or customer service. They are usually neglected as end-users because they are part of the company and using it is their job, and at the same time have no control over the product’s creation.
This is a bad financial decision because making their job harder usually means they work slower and can produce worse results. On top of that, their use of the product is important not only for them but also for the external end-users as it may affect their user experience.
It should be easy to get them involved in the development of the product because they are part of the company. And improving their user experience has a lot of benefits for all end-users.
How can a company be successful with end-users if it neglects the ones who are part of the company?