What are users doing with my product?

Focusing on function gets you a different same. Understanding the tasks a user is performing creates the real opportunities to innovate.

Function is what a product does.

The task is what the user does with the product.

Users expect a good set of functions that perform well in the products they buy. They also expect to be able to finish their task efficiently.

The humble tap

When market researchers asked homeowners what motivated their buying decisions on kitchen taps they listed the factors as follows:

• Style, including colour.
• Durability, including warranty.
• Price.
• Brand.

When asked what they liked about their current kitchen taps, homeowners ranked their results in the following order:

1. Style.
2. Durability.
3. Ease of repair.

The emphasis on style and durability is not lost on manufacturers. The motto of Moen is Buy it for Looks — Buy it for Life.

The questions asked by the market researchers are the wrong questions. They treat taps as a commodity item and ensure differentiation is based on style. Any tap can be made pretty. Buyers will buy the prettiest tap according to their tastes. How many buyers? How many different tastes? The product has splintered into hundreds of styles competing for market share. Commoditising their appearance has further commoditised taps. Now one tap doesn’t stand out from the crowd of other taps in any meaningful way.

To innovate, understand the utility

To innovate, especially with a commodity product, we must do more than change the appearance. We must get beyond the function to understand the tasks.

The function of all taps is to provide access to flowing water. That’s true for taps in the kitchen, the one in the bathroom sink, the taps in the bath tub or shower, and the one outside in the garden. The function tells us what a tap does, but not what tasks it is intended to facilitate. When we mistake function for tasks, change is unlikely to make the tap better at doing the thing we use it for.

What tasks is a tap really used for?

• In the bathroom sink we wash our hands, obtain drinking water, and brush our teeth.
• In the bath tub, we fill the tub with water and rinse our hair.
• In the garden fill the water can or connect a hose to water the plants and grass. We also clean outside surfaces like pathways or patios.
• In the kitchen we wash our hands, rinse the dishes, wash food, and obtain specific amounts of water for cooking.

There’s quite a few different tasks there. Does it make sense that taps are pretty much the same? Not really.

We’re no longer talking about just taps. Now we’re thinking about taps in the context of specific use. Tasks can be analysed and we can see how well a specific tap performs each of them.

Washing your hands in the kitchen

There are ten steps to wash my hands at the kitchen sink:

1. Approach the sink.

2. Grab the soap, which is presumably conveniently located near the sink.

3. Turn on the water.

4. Tweak until the water is at a comfortable temperature.

5. Wet my hands.

6. Apply the soap.

7. Rub my hands together to get them clean.

8. Rinse my hands under the running water.

9. Dry my hands on a nearby towel.

10. Turn off the water.

Wow. Ten steps! To wash my hands in the kitchen. And who knows how much heated water I wasted in the process. The task is a smidgeon more complicated than it needs to be and not exactly energy efficient. Plus, at the end I touched the tap with my clean hands — that’s the same tap I touched earlier with my dirty hands.

Doctors use sinks with a foot pedal to start the flow of water at a preset temperature and to stop it without using their hands. In public toilets, sensor-activated taps start the flow of water at a preset temperature. These are innovations that both simplify and make more efficient the task of washing your hands; perhaps dishes and food too. But, we’d have a hard time finding these taps in the home market.

Obtaining a specific amount of water for cooking

Water is usually measured for cooking in millilitres or fluid ounces (or cups). What if we could just put a saucepan under the tap and hit a button for each 100ml? We wouldn’t have to get a measuring jug or some other temporary receptacle and a measuring scale. It would also save water and energy because the water wouldn’t stay running while we moved the receptacle to the saucepan. We also wouldn’t have to clean additional items. That makes life simpler.

What if the measuring tap was located at the cooker rather than at the sink? If the amount dispensed is pre-measured and there’s no risk of overflow, then I don’t need to use the tap at the kitchen sink to get the water for cooking. This saves steps as well as water and energy.

Finding the task underneath the function

The above innovations don’t come from understanding market research or from understanding how taps work. They come from understanding the tasks a tap is used for. Good market research probably won’t reveal this because it’s difficult for users to get past the existing paradigm. They take as given and don’t challenge why they have to use a cup to measure water. They just do it. When they go shopping for taps they’re not looking for a self-measuring tap. They’re looking at style and colour.

We have to walk through a task and analyse each step before coming to this conclusion. Market research isn’t going to cut it because the homeowner in the focus group or survey panel hasn’t gone through the task analysis necessary for them to see the steps that need to be done.

To innovate we must observe and know deeply the tasks that a product facilitates. What’s the person trying to accomplish? How can I help her accomplish that? We must understand hand washing — the task, not water flow — the function.

Let’s go back to the self-measuring kitchen tap. Push a button once for 100ml, twice for 200ml, etc. Its correctness depends on whether users actually do things the way they’re supposed to do them. The recipe calls for 300ml of water. Does the user automatically measure 300ml or does he roughly pour in 300ml? If the measurement for one recipe is rough, that’s not true of all recipes. Cakes require precise measurement. Soups do not.

If we observe enough users preparing enough recipes, we’ll begin to get a sense of whether our innovations make sense. Do they add value because they would be constantly used by a good proportion of users? Or are they just features that might help sell the product but won’t actually be used in the end? Some innovations are definite improvements on old ways of doing things. But sometimes old behaviour is so deeply ingrained and implicitly understood that the motivation to change that old behaviour has to be very high for innovations to be accepted.

The purpose of innovation

An innovator sets out to save the user actual work in the completion of a task. The saving of work represents net utility. When we know what task a product is really used for, we can try identify steps that can be removed from that task.

Innovation is always a bold leap of imagination. It’s not more of the same.