“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Steve Jobs
Problems with ‘VoC’
Abridged from Anthony Ulwick’s great book, “What Customers Want”
The traditional approach of asking customers for solutions tends to undermine the innovation process. That’s because most customers have a very limited frame of reference. Customers only know what they have experienced. They cannot imagine what they don’t know about emergent technologies, new materials, and the like. What customer, for example, would have asked for the microwave oven or Velcro?
Don’t trust customers
By asking your customers for solutions, then, your company turns into a counter clerk at a fast-food restaurant. You take orders and rush to fill them.
“Customers should not be trusted to come up with solutions; they aren’t expert or informed enough for that part of the innovation process. That’s what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes—that is, what they want a new product or service to do for them.”
- Anthony Ulwick
There are several concrete dangers of listening to customers too closely. One of these is the tendency to make slow evolutionary changes, rather than bold big steps, which can leave the field open for competitors. Meeting customer demands to the letter also tends to result in “me-too” products. Customers merely ask for missing features that other manufacturers already offer.
Another danger arises in the common practice of listening to the recommendations of a narrow group of customers called “lead users”, customers who have an advanced understanding of a product and are experts in its use. Lead users can offer product ideas, but since they are not mainstream users, the products that spring from their recommendations may have limited appeal.
Finally, a company may be disappointed to discover that customers don’t want “new and improved” features and functions. If they are forced to pay for such new features, customers can even begin to resent the company. Most users avail themselves of less than 10% of the software’s overall capability and grumble when they feel forced to pay for upgrades to things they don’t use or want.
Customers don’t know what they want
The irony is that most organizations truly believe that they excel at listening to customers and delivering on their wishes. In 1996 a survey of 270 companies found that 71% were very satisfied with their ability to decipher what their customers want. Yet when companies give customers what they ask for and fail to see the results they hoped for, executives scratch their heads and conclude that customers don’t really know what they want.
Learn the lesson that was taught to Coca-Cola the hard way. In 1985 Coke was looking for a new innovation and decided to listen to their customers… They invented a new tasting formula which everyone preferred.
Coca-Cola president Donald Keough declared: “I’ve never been as confident about a decision as I am about the one we’re announcing today.”
Sadly for them though it was a commercial disaster, one of the most famous product development mis-steps in history.
“The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people” [Keough would later admit].
“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol… my assertion is that large parts of human behaviour are like a cryptic crossword clue: there is always a plausible surface meaning, but there is also a deeper answer hidden beneath the surface.”
Rory Sutherland (Alchemy, The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense)
Outcomes not Solutions.
With all user studies, focus on the outcomes that the user is trying to achieve, not the methods or solutions they wish they had to do it (results rather than features). They are not qualified to judge what a good solution is, but they are experts in knowing what they want to achieve.
Your strategy must be informed by customer input, but you must accept the heavy responsibility for coming up with new products and services on your own. For many companies, this responsibility of having to translate customer wishes into something of value constitutes a radically different approach to market research and product development.
“The innovation journey for many companies is little more than a hopeful wandering through customer interviews, which rarely uncovers the best ideas or an exhaustive set of opportunities for growth…”
Anthony Ulwick
Better Ways to Understand Customers
1. Be a User
The simplest first step in trying to understand users is to become one yourself, but with a critical and observant state of mind. This is called making a ‘user trip’, in which you use the product or service in a deliberate way and note down your reactions, observations, feelings etc.. The essential idea is very simple, explore the process of using something.
“The secret is to turn dissatisfaction into creative criticism, to develop an attitude of constructive discontent”
- Nigel Cross
First, decide which user’s point of view you are taking, customer, operator, maintenance person etc… (clearly you may want to take multiple ‘trips’ from different perspectives).
Next decide the limits, and the variations. It is often a good idea to extend the trip into activities before and after the thing you are investigating. Similarly, variations such as time of day, weather, how tired or hungry you are etc…
Then take the trip, making notes of even the smallest observation of discomfort or improvement opportunity. Remember if you are an experienced user, you may automatically adjust your behaviour to take into account things that could be done better. Try to use the product with a ‘beginners mind’ and hypersensitive to the situation.
These user trips can generate a large number of ideas, but predictably suffer a number of shortcomings that limit the usefulness. It can be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of users who are not like you... try to be self-aware of the things you’re feeling and the decisions you make. Something that is obvious to you may not be to others. Or you might make mistakes or false observations. Another approach that supports your user trip research is to observe others rather than be the user yourself.
2. Observe Users
Begin by understanding the level of experience of the users, this will help you draw conclusions from their experiences. Then get them to describe and demonstrate what seems important to them. Look for and ask about aspects that seem difficult or unusual or critical. In a work or industrial setting, it may be common for experienced users to have made modifications to make their jobs easier, for consumers, little things like additional cushions on a chair might signify more than just an aesthetic change. Inexperienced users can reveal the ‘learning curve’ a product may have and are a good source of ideas to improve people’s rate of adoption.
If you’re using volunteers, remember to be impartial, do not steer or influence the behaviour, unless to prevent damage or injury.
Case Study - Proctor & Gamble:
A fascinating approach that P&G (possibly the most successful customer research organisations in the world) use, and value very highly, when studying and observing users of their new products is an idea called a “Deprivation Study”… after having users trial their new idea for some time, they remove it and then study and interview users about their thoughts now that they do not have the product anymore. Do they miss it? Do they find life harder / worse without it? Or do they not notice it’s gone?
3. Run Experiments
One of the most effective ways of uncovering the real wants, behaviours and needs of customers is to conduct experiments with them. These might include things such as:
A Day in the Life
Search / Web Traffic & Trend Analysis
Paper / Clickable wireframe walk through prototypes
Storyboards and user scenarios
Pinocchio (Pretend to Own)
Product Box, a packaging mock up to see if the advertised product inside is of interest.
Mash-Ups bringing two or more things together into a crude but functional works like model.
Wizard of Oz / Mechanical Turk
Mock Sales
For some more examples and the importance of experiments in the business world as well as product design and development, have a look at the Minimum Viable Products page.
4. Look for the “Job-to-be-Done”
Customer ‘Jobs’ are a relatively new concept where the researcher aims to uncover the desired outcome and why a customer ‘hired’ a particular product or service to achieve this result. As a thinking approach for innovation and new ideas it can be used at a more holistic level (championed by Clayton Christensen) or more detailed and specific (championed by Anthony Ulwick). Customers are doing or buying something to achieve something. Who the customer is doesn’t matter, it’s the job they are trying to do that’s important.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards towards technology, not the other way around”
Steve Jobs
Users and Customers?
Remember that they may not be the same person. In large organisations often the purchasing department or ‘buyer’ is the customer (the person who makes the decision to buy whatever it is) but the user might be someone else. The choice of which education software to use at a university for example will be bought by a central purchasing team, with the users being the staff and students.
If the organisation is working well together, both groups should be aligned, but often they are not.
As a designer, you need to know who your customer is. Just because the users love your offering doesn’t mean they will buy it if the customer doesn’t. Children seem to want the loudest, most garish toys they can have, whilst the parents might want something educational, sustainable and hand crafted from wood… or conversely the kids just want the box the thing came in… :-)
Which should you focus on?
I’ve been asked which group generates success for your project? I’m sure we all know of innovative small companies or new projects that focused on the user experience but were unaware of or ignored the customer, either through ignorance or through a belief that if the user loved their product the customer would have no choice.
My thoughts are that if you want to generate short term success, all your attention should be on the customer. But if the customer and user are different people, long term sustained success comes from delighting the user.
Fake the product not the experience.
Understanding the customer is so important, the easiest way to do that is with something to test.
Customer’s can’t be trusted to tell you what they really mean, asking them what they want may send you down a dead end or on a wild goose chase… Often the best way to test your understanding and the customer’s need is to give them something to use. Proctor & Gamble’s “Deprivation Studies” are a fascinating way of testing this. In these studies they give sample customers a new product to use for several weeks or months. Asking them for their thoughts and opinion during the study gives lots of data. But data that is very weak, you can’t be sure if they are just telling you what they think you want to hear. So P&G largely ignore this data and then remove the product and come back to the user a few weeks later and ask them if they missed it.
If they missed it, then it looks promising, if they can’t remember what you’re talking about then the product was no good.
The problem with this approach is it can be very expensive to develop the product to a useable state before you know if anyone wants the product or not. For a new kind of toothbrush the price might be an acceptable risk. But if it’s something with a lot of expensive technology or complicated systems it may be many years before you have something functional.
Fake the product not the experience.
How can you create the illusion of the product working without having to actually get it to work? How can you make the feel for a new product or business for very low cost, quickly and that gets to the root cause of the offering?