Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 25, 2006 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Roland Rust

"Engineering to Frustration: Feature Fatigue"

ABSTRACT -- Customers think they want a lot of features, but after they actually use a product their desires change dramatically, as they realize the frustration of coping with something overly complex and suffer from "feature fatigue." This effect is seen in the technologically savvy as well as novices. Before purchase, capability is weighed heavier than usability, but once actual usage takes place, usability assumes much more importance. The lesson for engineering is to keep things simple--even simpler than what the customers say they want. They will thank you in the long run.

SPEAKER -- Roland T. Rust holds the David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is Chair of the Marketing Department and is Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Service. He is currently Editor of the Journal of Marketing. His book, Driving Customer Equity (written with Valarie Zeithaml and Katherine Lemon) won the 2002 Berry-AMA (American Marketing Association) Book Prize for the best marketing book of the previous three years. He is the founder and Chair of the AMA's annual Frontiers in Services Conference, and was founding Editor of the Journal of Service Research. He was the Director (and Founder), Center for Service Marketing at Vanderbilt University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has a BA in Mathematics from DePauw University, and his Ph.D in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.