Understanding Customer Values

Understanding customer's values is key to getting to delight.

How often do you identify what your customer's values are? How do you use that information when designing solutions for them? If the solutions to customer's problems don't mesh with their view of the world and their values, they won't find the solution delightful. If they do... wow.

Examples of companies that focus on values:

• Harley-Davidson designs everything to support their customer's underlying values of experiencing freedom, adventure and community.
• Boon designs things to support their customer's underlying value of style and whimsy.
• The Body Shop designs solutions to support their customer's underlying values of being sustainable, natural and unique.
• Lego designs things that support their customer's values of play, creativity and community.

The better you are at recognizing a customer's values, the more likely you will be to delight them.

Here is a wonderful video of a small business customer talking about his business. Watch it and try to figure out his values. Then, look at the first of the "comments" on this blog entry for my assessment. How close are you?

Deeper Empathy Through Reflection

One of my passions lately is in understanding how we can get deeper understandings of our customers... if we can establish "Deep Customer Empathy", then we can develop better solutions for them. I'm not alone in my recognition that we need to get deeper. Companies are starting to hire more ethnographers and specialists to help bring those understandings to the company. However, that's not enough. Everyone at the company needs to have the empathy, not just the researcher. Matthew May just wrote about this a couple of days ago. There is a WONDERFUL new book on the topic by Dev Patnaik, called "Wired to Care". Both are well worth reading.

To researchers and designers, this stuff might seem like it is old-hat. However, I've found that even researchers and designers don't necessarily go far enough in their investigations. I think an important step, when studying people who aren't you, is "reflecting" what you have heard and seen and how you are interpreting it. The customer can "course correct" you if you are slightly off.

For example, a team I was recently working with was trying to come up with new ideas for a market they hadn't really focused on before - young adults. I had them do some ethnographic research and some interviews, and when they analyzed the data, they determined that the area where the most opportunity seemed to be was in planning for the "mid-term". This market was great at managing near-term events (things in the next few weeks) and very long-term (retirement), but not really the time in between. The team identified a problem around planning for the time between 4 months to 40 years. I then brought some of the participants from our earlier research in to review the insight. Their reaction was lovely. They absolutely agreed on the problem, but they couldn't agree with the time frame. For this market, they couldn't really comprehend 40 years. They corrected the time-span of the problem to 4 months to 10 years...

This was just one of the things they dug into with the customer. But, it illustrates the importance of clarifying and getting deeper with customers. It isn't enough just to observe customers and understand where they are coming from. Since you are filtering things through your own eyes and experience, you should go the extra step to reflect with the customer to make sure you have it right.

New article on being a better manager... via Design Thinking

There is a lot of talk about Design Thinking lately. What is it? It is applying the methods of "thinking like a designer" to problem solving. And it works so well that very legitimate sources of information in the business world are starting to embrace it.

The latest article on the topic is from MIT Sloan Management Review: How to become a better manager... by thinking like a designer. The article covers a variety of topics, from simplicity to experimentation, from effective team size to communications.

One of my favorite quotes in the article is from Nancy Duarte:

"[Managers] rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning." (p. 40-41)

People can interpret things very differently, even when it is concrete data. We tend to filter our understanding and interpretation of the world based on our own perspective, values and assumptions. By creating a context around the information and redefining the meaning of it, you can build a persuasive and compelling story - which can result in a shared vision.

Not doing things we know we need to be doing

I need to get on a regular exercise routine. I have great intentions, it's the follow through that is lacking. I know how to do it, I just don't. Why? I'm busy, it seems like it will be a lot of work, I'm kind of tired... for some reason, although I need to do it, I don't.

I've noticed the same thing happening with customer research in product design. We know we need to do it. We know how to do it, at least to some extent. But, we often just don't do it. We skip over the research in understanding the problem and empathizing with customers, we skip over bringing customers into our design process to get feedback and direction on our concepts, we even skip over usability testing and validating that the customers can use the solutions we design to solve their problems. At the end, we release a product and wonder why on earth it doesn't delight our customers.

I decided to tackle my exercise issue head on. I signed up for a publicly visible exercise diary that reported my exercise on my Facebook page. You might ask one of the following three questions:

1. Why on Earth would you want to publish your exercise behaviors on Facebook?
2. How will signing up for a diary tool get you to actually exercise?
3. What does this have to do with design research?

To the first point, it makes me accountable to others. Okay, others aren't really looking over my shoulder, but if I don't track, it will be like a public confession that I didn't exercise again today. If I do, I may occasionally get encouragement from others. By doing this, I get myself to be honest to myself. Frankly, I'm much more likely to do something appropriate if I know I'm being watched.

I'm not alone in this. There is strong evidence that tracking your behavior, or knowing that your behavior is being tracked, can actually change your behavior. The effect of just measuring can get this result. It has been shown to be effective for getting people to eat better, exercise more, study more, and even drive more evenly.

Finally, what does this have to do with design research? The same effect is likely to work. Logging your customer research activities in a publicly visible place (okay, maybe just visible to other employees at your company) will result in more customer research activities. Tracking can help you see how far you've come and recognize the value in the interactions you are having with customers. You might even find that you are able to improve the quality of your interactions based on this information.

If you try this out, let me know how it works.

No *** for passwords!

At the recent UPA conference in Portland, I attended a session that was on best practices in the registration process. The talk was okay, but the conversation around it was more interesting. One of the things that got raised was how users had problems creating passwords when the system changed the password text to ****. People thought it was for security if you were in a public place, but then Stephanie Rosenbaum piped up and told us the real history. Apparently, this was a holdover from old word-processing machines that created a paper receipt of everything you typed. In other words, we've developed a standard based on an old, out of date technology!

Jakob Nielsen commands that we stop using password masking in his most recent alertbox article. He points out that as we are moving to a more mobile device-centric world, misspellings and mistyping becomes more common. This is a real problem for masked passwords because the user won't know that they've made an error until the password fails. He does offer a carrot to those who want to keep masking: make it optional and let the user decide.

The best advice I think I've gotten in my career

Next to my desk is a yellowing sheet of paper that I treasure. On it are 3 rules that I live by in my career, and I thought I'd share them:

1. Say NO
2. Keep standards reasonable
3. Take time out for thinking

These rules were written down on this paper during a conversation with a colleague, Pete Amico, who was brilliant enough to see through my frazzled state and offer me such sage advice. Pete left the company years ago, but the rules are still up on my wall where I look at them frequently.

Say No.
Here's the thing. I tend to be one of those people who really wants to help. So, I say yes. The problem is, it isn't really possible to do everything. In order to be at my best, it is important for me to make choices and say no to things I could do, and even things that I really should do. Saying yes to everything means that I have way too much going on to handle well, which brings us to rule 2.

Keep standards reasonable
I have high standards for myself. I tend to hold all of the work that I do to this high standard. That's great when I can pull it off, but not when I am trying to juggle multiple things. It isn't possible to do "great" on everything. I have to prioritize what is absolutely critical to do really well, and what will work if I just do okay. To do that, I need to follow rule 3.

Take time out for thinking
When there is a ton of stuff on my plate (because of my tendency to say yes) and I need to put in a lot of time to do it right (because of my tendency to hold myself to unreasonably high standards), I find myself with no time for thinking. Thinking, though, is critical to produce high quality work and to figure out what my priorities are.

So, the three rules are rules that I need to live by. Maybe they'll help you too.

(ps. consider applying these rules to designing products too... )

Business + Anthropology = nirvana, or something else...

Navi Radjou blogged last week about R&D 2.0, which he suggests is more about anthropology than engineering. His blog on the Harvard Business Publishing site was focused on R&D in emerging markets, but is representative of a trend I've seen in the business literature lately.

I'm intrigued with the recent business "crush" on anthropological/ ethnographic methods. It seems that people are thirsty for real stories and deep understanding to give them direction.

I fear, though, for the impending backlash. If businesses don't apply those stories and lessons to improve their products and services, the role of ethnography may be seen as a passing fancy, a waste of precious resources. I think the key will be to have people who can translate meaning into direction and business implications.

If we do succeed in making businesses more sensitive to where customers are really coming from, it could be a beautiful thing. Business people will benefit from having the deeper customer understanding that comes from ethnographic research, and researchers will benefit from having to apply rigorous business thinking to their findings.

But... part of me is thinking back a few years to when the crush was on psychologists and usability. It isn't that usability isn't critical to businesses these days, it is often cited as one of the more important elements of the success of products. Many companies now have usability professionals on staff or regularly hire usability consultants to conduct research for them. However, in an era of limited budgets, I'm not seeing much growth or even discussion of the need for adding more psychologists to the payroll. (Maybe I'm not looking in the right place). I think that the problem is that usability is often thought of as a quality assurance step, instead of a strategic goal. Psychologists and usability researchers help perpetuate this by focusing on "usability problems" instead of the cognitive principles that can guide the direction and design of usable and enjoyable solutions. Our time hasn't past, but we have kind of dropped the ball in focusing so much on such a small piece of the picture.

For anthropologists and ethnographers (and user experience researchers who have a broader skillset than just usability testing), I hope that you can leverage your current moment in the spotlight to show real business value and differentiation through the work that you do. If so, everyone benefits and we will continue to see growth and excitement around the integration of ethnographic research in business.