You don’t know what your customer wants until you become them

The often quoted Steve Jobs line below has been used by some to distrust any market research, and still by others as flat out short-sighted. And as we shall see, he wasn’t right, but nor was he wrong.

‘‘People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page’’.

Blinkbox

A few years before iOS and Android rolled out their screen time controls, I worked on a project to create a new app for children’s video streaming, Blinkbox. Concerning for many parents interviewed in the initial interviews was how to control just how much time their child spent watching TV on their tablets. In response to this, a key defining feature and selling point of this app was a whole set of controls to allow parents to set how much their child could watch, with timed lockouts to push out the child from the app. Early user testing of the prototype proved that users not only quickly understood the controls but were thrilled to finally be able to remotely control their child’s viewing.

A few days later, I attended a presentation by a team of researchers commissioned by Blinkbox debriefing their behavioural studies. Placing cameras into the living rooms of five families over a period of three consecutive weeks and handing each family a new tablet, the aim of this ethnography was to understand the natural behaviour of people as they used their ‘family’ tablets. In ethnographic research such as this, it is typical for the first week of footage to be disregarded since the participants’ behaviour is contrived whilst they slowly adapt to the idea of being observed. In the second week, however, what became clear was that as the child participants picked up the tablets with real ease switching seamlessly between the various different video apps installed, from YouTube to Netflix through to Amazon and so on, often without interruption until a parent came to take the tablet away.

Taking these findings in, I realised that a lock-out in our own video app would only push child users towards competitor video apps already installed and readily available to the child. Any lock-out would have to be at the OS level. A few days afterwards, we gained yet more verbal positive feedback from exasperated parents on the timed lockouts during further user testing. Only this time, at the end of each session I asked just one question that would eventually change our whole direction:

Me: ‘If an app crashes on your tablet whilst your child is using it, does your child then put down the whole tablet?’
Parent user: ‘[pause] …No, they usually just go to another app’
Me: ‘thank you, that is all.’

We got the same answer every single time. We scrapped the lock-outs entirely.

Blinkbox Parental Control UI

This bizarre conflict of response brings to mind an amusing quote from what must have been a frustrated David Ogilvy, the late famous ad exec:

‘‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say’’.

So then why didn’t the respondents tell us the right answer at the start?

Very simply, they couldn’t. To be clear, it’s unlikely the respondents were lying or in any way deliberately changing the answers.. they just didn’t know what they knew and they didn’t know that we needed to know those things. But nor did we initially know to ask for them. Or as Donald Rumsfeld once famously posited:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

To understand this issue let’s look a little deeper at some research conducted by Henry A. Landsberger in the 1920s and 1930s at the Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, now known as the ‘Hawthorne Studies’. Commissioned by Western Electric, in his groundbreaking work, Landsberger and his researchers took several workers out of their usual environments and set them up in a special area for easier observation and manipulation of surroundings. The aim: to see if changes to the environment could improve worker productivity.

The researchers found that absolutely any changes to the work environment such as light conditions, length of the work day, timing of breaks all improved the research participants’ productivity regardless of how they were modified. Productivity only decreased back to normal after the participants knew that the experiment had ceased. Any alterations to a participant’s environment in a test setting generated artificial responses and muddied results because the participants inherently felt special or ‘chosen’ and wanted to impress the researchers.

The usual desk setup (left) vs the research area (right)

Looking back at the ethnographic videos I observed, one might suggest that a Hawthorne effect was taking place on the children with the tablets. After all, these were new tablets that had been issued out for the purposes of observation under a camera in the room and so they may have been deliberately using them more than they might normally. However, the responses of the parent participants when challenged by me in the subsequent user testing proved that this was not the case. The child participants’ behaved authentically with the tablets under the camera in their own living rooms. Further, a key difference between the Hawthorne Studies and the in-home tablet research was the extent to which the natural setting of the participants was adhered to as much as possible, designed to reduce disruption to participants’ lives and routines.

What both research studies do point to, however, is a critical need for researchers to have contextual empathy of their participants. Without this, we could never have known the right questions to ask. Unfortunately, contextual empathy is sorely missing in tech product development today, being rarely if ever touched upon in user testing.

So who does it right?

Looking outside the field of tech, IKEA’s design team have adopted contextual empathy in the form of ethnography as a core tenet of their culture. As such, a key part of their design process sees IKEA frequently sending out its designers to visit their customers’ homes around the world to observe, take photos and be a part of their customers’ homes for a short period of time. This builds empathy helping them to understand who they’re designing for and in what context. This is critical for understanding cultures that do not conform to their own, and even more so for the cultures they mistakenly think conform to theirs.

On visits to the UK, one discovery for the Scandinavian team was that Brits prefer higher beds to the far lower beds of their continental European counterparts, often driven by storage space needs. As continental Europeans themselves, the designers could not have known this without exploring and observing their customers’ homes to understand the private spaces in which they lived and the relationships the customers had to their furniture and objects.

The visits are also particularly valuable in discovering new ideas and inventions, often created by customers themselves. The workarounds or ‘hacks’ that more experimental customers may develop can sometimes inform new innovative product lines.

Marcus Engman, IKEA’s Chief Creative Officer, during a home visit

Outside of the field of product development we see another example of deep contextual empathy in use in the world of show biz. Method acting, or The Method, first developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, sees the actor go through a rigorous training and rehearsal schedule that encourages them to ‘live and breathe’ as the character, to truly become them for a more authentic portrayal.

Famous examples of this are Marlon Brando, particularly in his characterisation of Stanley Kowalski in A Street Car Named Desire, to more extreme examples such as Daniel Day Lewis. Indeed, Daniel Day Lewis learned Czech for his role in the Unbearable Lightness of Being, lived in a wheelchair for the entire shoot of My Left Foot, and stayed on a Massachusetts island whilst filming The Crucible on the film set’s replica village, planting fields with 17th-century tools, and building and living in his character’s house without electricity or running water.

As with the IKEA home visits, in spite of being odd and certainly extreme, the intention here is the same. To encourage deeply authentic performances and products, the creator must build empathy, and identify with the character or customer at a personal level, experiencing their inner motivations and emotions as their own.

So why is this important?

In tech, we pour billions into product development, researching and ensuring that the tech, the interface, the actions are all as simple and usable, easy to follow as possible. And to be sure, this is admirable. We’ve come a long way since the days of command line only interfaces and incomprehensible ‘computer says no error code 12345’ error messages. But all of this will only ever tell you if your product is usable. It cannot tell you if your product is useful. Yet as we have shown, even interviews and questionnaires simply can’t answer the all important question, ’would you actually use this?’ And this is critical when a company has millions of dollars in funding riding on this all important question.

So to Steve Jobs I say, certainly our task is to read things that are not yet on the page, but we cannot see that blank page until we look for it in our customers’ homes and places of work. That blank page is stored away on the shelves, the cupboards, sitting on the sofa, holding up the bed, crumpled among the mess on a desk or left plastered on a kitchen wall of our customers, and it is our duty to go hunting for it.

The Three Building Blocks for In-context observation of your customer

1. Looking at your sales and usage figures, identify your:

• Lead customers
  These are expert users of your product and frequently find advanced workarounds or other uses for it that you may not have considered.
• Extreme customers
  These people use your product and service the most frequently and top the charts in usage minutes. They’ll have interesting insights into how well your product scales at its limits, and be able to identify and locate where break points are.
• Standard customers
  These people use your product and service the most frequently and top the charts in usage minutes. They’ll have interesting insights into how well your product scales at its limits, and be able to identify and locate where break points are.
• Your outreach customers
  Those who may not use your product yet or don’t use it too often. Why aren’t they using it yet? What else is filling their needs? What can you learn from this group?

2. Visit the homes and offices of a selection of your lead, extreme, standard and outreach customers to explore and immerse yourself in their life

• Interview for empathy – why might they be saying what they’re saying and doing what they’re doing? To do this, it helps to think about the following:
• Rather than use a structured questionnaire, explore their surroundings to develop a keen understanding of their context, from here build your questions organically.
• When questioning, create a Journey Map that shows point to point what potential snags and drop off points arise, and where workarounds appear
• Create an Empathy map that explores what this customer is thinking and feeling, hearing (who’s influencing them?), seeing, oblivious to, saying, keeping quiet about, doing and avoiding with the product in the context of their own home or office.
• How does this fit against their pains, gains and jobs to be done?

3. Create a persona

This is your straw man, your collection of notes from your home visit about each key customer type. In this you’ll want to collate:

• Have core needs: jobs to be done, the gains and pains facing them
• Their context and environment that influences this
• Their constraints
• Their workarounds