When designing a product or service we usually do a market research trying to answer how many users will want our product and buy it, and if we’re lucky we can even aim to get a approximate price. This idea comes from every basic marketing or market research class taught out there. Doing this is valid and good, but not the whole picture. Users don’t want your product they want something your product helps them do or be. A juice drinker doesn’t want the orange juice, he wants to be healthy (and have the vitamin C or avoid any kind of soda drink), he wants to be recognized as healthy. A person who buys a Canon 5D doesn’t want the Canon 5D  he wants better pictures and to be a better photographer, in fact he is buying that product because he knows pros use it and he wants to take high quality pictures.

If our users don’t want our product then what do they want? They want the experience. And with this the whole landscape of product and business design changes. When developing a product we need to focus on what our users would like to be by using our product. I bought a new TV not because it’s great and has lot’s of features, I bought it so I could be more productive using it as a second screen for my PC. Knowing the reason why someone buys a product will help you design a better experience for that person. Let’s go back to the Canon camera, how about if the camera came with a password for an on-line photography course and access to a site that has tips on how to take better pictures. Or Canon could change the manual and teach people how to use it while teaching them photography.

Users don’t want our product so let’s stop talking about it and talk more about the what the product means for the user. When we advertise we usually try to hook some feelings by providing this message to the user. We put a free woman doing sports to sell the Nike Women’s line or we create a cool character to sell Apple computers, until that point we’re in the right path. Marketing goes in the right path because its focused mainly on the user, while design and sales are focused on technology and the business side of the operation.The problem starts during the design process where we seek to create the product with the most features and strengths, like a fortified with calcium, magnesium and zing orange juice or a camera with 500 shooting styles, etc. Sometimes the design process is fine and the problem rises during the sales process. When we have someone that sells TV sets, they don’t sell you the best entertainment experience, they sell you the TV with the highest resolution, more USB ports and the capability of having up to 5 HDMI devices connected. I could care less about that when buying a TV.

So let’s go a bit deeper in each of this reasons.

The design process includes the conception of the idea.When we think about the idea we are in the correct path thinking what will make us better at something. Then when we got the idea we start to lose focus and concentrate of features everyone wants. We don’t usually think about what our users will do with the product and how can we help them achieve what they want. What they want is the hard thing to figure out, but the web design technique of creating a persona or a set of them is really good for this. If we create a specific persona for the product we are going to create we can develop how this person feels and how our product is supposed to help them with their tasks. We usually avoid this step and decide to design for each and every one of the potential customers we have ending up with a product that is so broad it won’t be easy to use for anyone, except a rocket scientist. In the case of a product like a TV we will end up with a TV with some features people will go crazy by trying to figure out the manual and the experience with our company will turn the hype of having something new into a crappy experience.

 One example of a product that was developed like this is 37Signals’ Basecamp, which is a project management software designed for a specific type of user that doesn’t want to get much complication about managing a project. Basecamp is basically thought to help people be more efficient and effective at managing their projects and they have only included the features that do this, all the other extra things you find in other project management software have been avoided. This is because the user wants to manage how tasks are being done and not lose attention in a  myriad of things about project management that only apply to big industrial companies. 

The 37 signals team decided what features to leave out based on their insight on how their users will feel about if some feature was added.This focus was achieved because they started designing this product for themselves. That guaranteed a deep knowledge of the users.

 Will it be useful? Will it add value? Will it confuse the user? All this questions are valid while deciding if a feature or add-on needs to go into a product. How ever the most important question to ask is: What will a user  be able to do/achieve/look/know in a better way than before using this product? 

The answers could vary: for a Canon DSLR is about being a better photographer, for Basecamp is being a better project collaborator and for the Orange Juice is knowing you’re drinking a healthy product and being healthy because of it. Somehow your product helps people become something better. 

Consider the opposing case of a fortified orange juice that covers the needs of kids, adults and more. If you want to be healthy you won’t buy it because it has too much calories, kids won’t drink it because all the fortified stuff has probably made the taste really bad and if you like to be a better person to the planet you won’t use it because of the plastic bottle. 

The sales process is being lost, but it’s still done in B2B, high end retail stores and on the web by how the products are arranged and displayed. The main flaw in the sales process is that it doesn’t matter if the marketing and product have designed to help the user be better, if while selling we fail to stress out how our product will make the user better and show it we won’t achieve the high sales goals management has set for us. 

Management usually sets a goal for their sales team and they lack in the training part where the sales person isn’t told how the product will effect that’s person ability to do something and why they should buy it. If the designers have done their work, then it’s a communication problem that can make the difference between achieving goals or not, but it also can make the difference between getting a repeat buy or grow someone frustrated with our brand.

The solution comes from Design Thinking. In the stage of design we usually plan for really cool stuff and then develop it much more complex and less cool than what it could’ve been. Design inspired innovation requires that a product is desirable, feasible and viable. When we design a very complex product like the latest non-apple computer or the new Canon camera we usually add things that are feasible and viable and we never think if this things are really desirable to have. The key here is that the features need to be desirable for your customer not for the designer.  To know your users a bit better before designing a lot of empathy is needed.

Empathy is the key social skill for designing a product that will bring your users the outcome they want by using it. To be empathic we need to understand our users in a cognitive, emotional, physical, social and cultural level. This wide range of understanding will make us know why people do things and how can we help them be better at those exact things. 

For example, the iPhone could have lot’s of features but by knowing what users will use the most and how they will interact with them made apple design it for simplicity of use, with just some buttons that trigger specific actions all the time. Apple made a device to make their users better at doing whatever they do by providing them with a platform to make the key features of a computer available on a hand held device. 

Knowing our users will give us the insight on what is desirable and we can add up to what is viable and feasible according to the technology we have. The desirable part is what will make us drop features and understand how our users adapt to our product. If we start adding the insights from the users to all the technical and business knowledge of our teams we will get users to want what our product makes them feel and want to get more from us because we deliver.

Empathy can also improve the sales process as the sales reps will know exactly how to connect to what users want and let them know how the product will help them get better, rather than listing a ton of features. How will your tool help users be better at managing their projects, etc.

So we started talking about what Market research is all about and I think a key addition to this is to add lot’s of qualitative data from user observation, interviews and insights from the early and late adopters.

Related: 

See how apple focuses on the user, rather than on the product - Lessons from Apple on Advertising and Aesthetics