Understanding Customers
For simplicity of language I’m going to use the term customer whether they are an actual customer or just someone you wish was a customer.
Knowing what people want.
The age old problem of trying to work out what people want is of critical importance if your job is trying to design something that will influence their behaviour or make them give you money for something you’ve made.
It used to be thought that simply identifying a problem and solving it was enough to get customers. However there are many examples of highly desirable products that don’t do anything useful or certainly not enough to justify the inflated price tag and every failed startup founder will tell you that their solution was good but people just didn’t buy it. There are also lots of examples of design changes that cause people to buy for inexplicable reasons…
“Imagine you’re sitting in the boardroom of a major global drinks company, charged with producing a new product that will rival the position of Coca-Cola… The first thing I would say is something like this: ‘We need to produce a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, that costs less than Coke, and that comes in a really big bottle so people get great value for money.’ What I’m fairly sure nobody would say is this: ‘Hey, let’s try marketing a really expensive drink, that comes in a tiny can ...and that tastes kid of disgusting.’ Yet that is exactly what one company did… that drink was Red Bull.
Before Red Bull launched outside of Thailand… a specialist in reseraching the flavouring of drinks, had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product… ‘I wouldn’t drink this piss if you paid me to’ was one refrain.’ Yet over six billion cans are now sold annually.”
- Rory Sutherland (Alchemy, The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense)
Voice of the Customer (VoC)
The traditional method for discovering what we should make or do next was the simplest. Let’s ask our customer what they want… Surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups are all different ways of doing this. The results of this would be classed as the “Voice of the Customer” (VoC)
This can be both qualitative (collecting opinions and subjective responses) from a focus group, or quantitative (numerical data) from a survey response. Questionnaires are typically either a choice of possible answers, an agreement to a phrase along a scale (0, I strongly disagree – 5, I strongly agree) or open-ended responses where people are encouraged to describe their thoughts on a subject.
Focus groups are usually between 6-12 participants, and they have been gathered together to discuss a particular issue or try a potential product for example. A group leader / facilitator will also be present to lead the discussion and suggest things for the participants to talk about. But they should let the participants develop their own trains of thought and bring up their own issues.
Quality Function Deployment (QFD)
Developed in Japan in 1960s as a quality control method, it was modified to help transform the voice of the customer into engineering characteristics for a product.
Take ‘VoC’ in terms of user wishes and requirements
Match against a range of technical requirements
Compare against competitor solutions
The process often looks very complicated, and can be a mess if you have more than 20 categories, but it’s a commonly used and established way of translating qualitative ideas into quantitative metrics and so despite it’s flaws and complexity it’s an important method to be knowledgably of.
A car door example. VoC information from the customer has been summarised into Customer Attributes, what the customer wants: Easy to close from outside, Stays open on a hill, Rain leakage etc… and correlated with the engineering characteristics to achieve this.
The results is a detailed comparison with the competitors and some specification boundaries within which a new design should be popular.
However QFD can be exhausting to complete (because it is exhaustive in VoC terms, everything can be included). It's time consuming and not useful until complete. But perhaps most worrying from an innovation sense is that predetermined elements lock in the existing paradigm. It assumes the customer is logical and knows what they want.
Link to more information:
Also pages 122-136 of Nigel Cross’ book Engineering Design Methods (fourth edition) has a great explanation with worked examples. It’s available in the library and we’ll try to put a link to the chapter on Moodle.
