How do you excite the imagination of your team to devise new ways of solving design problems, to create new ideas and better user experiences? Where do you start? Design firms, and those invested in design thinking and innovation, start by asking customers what they want. I’ll be the first to admit that I relish talking to customers, getting inside their heads to the point where I can “see” their needs and aspirations (i.e., empathy). But user research can be problematic if it’s not handled right. When firms expect customers to know what they want, and have accurate insight into how to solve their own problems, they are in for a surprise because customers are often unable to express what they want if they are even good at identifying it. Without a doubt, customers know what rubs them the wrong way and what brings them delight. However, customers are mostly clueless about how to come up with solutions to fix their issues. In some cases, lead users (e.g., die-hard, I’m never leaving this brand, customers) are able to express what they want due to their extensive and intimate experience with a brand, but that’s not typical.
Rev-up your firm’s imagination, ask customers about outcomes.
How do we resolve this challenge? If you want to release, say a blockbuster app, “Stop asking customers what they want.Start asking what they want your products to do for them,” advises Anthony W. Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn, a consulting firm based in San Francisco, and frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review. As a researcher, it’s tempting to give serious consideration to the solutions that customers suggest, but it’s imperative to distinguish between outcomes and solutions. Why? While we would like to think we can imagine solutions to our problems, as humans we only know what we’ve experienced. The average customer isn’t trained in design thinking (i.e., problem identification into problem solution). Another issue is our human tendency to fixate on the way services and products are normally used (i.e., functional fixedness). And as esteemed researcher Dr. Don Norman would say, (in my words), people are not paying attention to the internal and external influences on them. And, if you ask people what they want you’ll get opinions, good or bad. Norman would prefer design by experts.
In an interesting case, “Kawasaki asked customers to suggest improvements to its Jet Ski stand-up recreational water-craft. They requested side padding for more comfortable standing – never dreaming of a seated craft. Competitors developed seated models, trumping Kawasaki.” Research has shown that, generally speaking, customers are only able to say what they want if they are given options to pick from within familiar product categories. For example, “Nissan Design managed to figure out – through questioning and using leather samples – how U.S. customers wanted their new cars to smell,” according to Dorothy Leonard Professor at Harvard’s school of business. For this reason alone, we need to leave design thinking, “imagining the unimaginable,” says Ulrich, to designers and innovators; that’s what they are trained to do, what they are for.
Drawing people out
Understanding what satisfies and delights customers is fundamental to raising business’s customer satisfaction index, a component of the customer experience (Market-Based Management), especially in today’s mobile connected economy where information flows freely but can be easily misunderstood. And in the Kawasaki example, it’s how firm’s compete for customer’s wallets and in turn market share. The trick to teasing outcomes from users during interviews is drawing them out, a skill that helps people to clarify, develop and refine their ideas. I’ve found this to be a tool of choice, and a really effective method to help people arrive at their real problems, those problems they won’t bring up because they seem impossible to solve. Also, drawing people out is critical to getting to the core of what a person is trying to say. It’s key to exploring the results they want to achieve in doing their jobs, playing a game, listening to music, ordering online, or enjoying some other activity.
Limitations of Listening
Focusing on outcome-based dialogues during user interviews and usability studies takes skill and determination on the part of the researcher/facilitator. For one, people tend to talk features not about the results they want to achieve so the researcher or research team must distinguish between outcomes and solutions. As Ulrich says, “weed out vague statements, anecdotes, and other irrelevant comments.” Just like drawing people out, Ulrich has found that steering people into conversations about how they work and why they do what they do, keeps the conversation about the process. Dr. Norman would agree! And the answers that they’ll give, well they become the inputs needed for design and R&D teams to innovate, not as an act of serendipity, rather in “a manageable, predictable discipline.”
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