Why is important to know your customer needs

Do you know how your customer uses your product? Are you covering his needs?

When we talk about user experience, customer experience, service design or, more generally, user centered design, understanding what are user needs and how they use your product shall always be your starting point. Let’s see it with an example.

The case of the over featured microwave ovens

Every morning, I take a glass of milk with a custom made mixture of cocoa, plantain cream, oat cream, brewer’s yeast and a little of cane sugar. The process to prepare it is very simple. First, I pour some milk in a mug and a spoon of the cocoa mixture. Then, I introduce the mug in the microwave and after a few seconds at maximum power, the content is hot enough. I do this to ease mixing the powder with the milk. Finally, after stirring, I fulfill the mug with milk and enjoy my breakfast.

Other of my routinely uses of the microwave is to heat my lunch. I usually cook on Sundays for the whole week. I carry a lunch box to the office and I heat it in the microwave oven. Typically, I heat it between one and a half and two minutes at maximum power.

Sporadically, I also use the microwave when I forgot to defrost some meat I am going to cook. I have to set the power to the defrost mode and I set two or three minutes depending on the size.

As you can see, these uses of the oven is quite basic and if you ask people around you, probably most of them will perform similar tasks. However, if we took a look at the control panel of most of microwave ovens, they seem to be thought by the NASA.

(1) They have lots of buttons

Crowded control panel of a microwave oven

(2) Each model and brand has different layout and functions on the buttons

Except for the numpad, the functions, location, icons and labels differ from model to model

(3) Even within the same brand buttons are different

Location and icon are different for each model.

(4) Important, and most commonly used buttons do not stand out.

Start, is the button use every time. It does not stand out.

Let’s think of a design that fits better most basic people needs

Here you have a sketch of a possible design of my ideal microwave oven:

Proposed design. Just 6 buttons.

This new design is much simpler. At the top, it has a display and a total of six buttons.

The display shows the time when the microwave is not in use. When it is being used, it shows the number of minutes and seconds remaining.

Under the display we have two buttons to set the clock. The one labeled with the H increases the hours and the other increases the minutes. Below them, a text What do you want to do? and two more buttons, one labeled Heat/Cook and the other labeled Defrost. These buttons have a light indicator (for instance a LED) that informs the user which option is active.

Finally, we have the action buttons: Pause/Stop and the Start button, which adds +30 seconds to the time on each press. This feature of the +30 seconds is fairly common among different vendors, and I think, pretty useful.

A tweak of the +30 seconds, may be that if you hold the button or press it repeatedly it can make larger increases (+1min, +2min, etc.)

This new design is simple, easy to understand and covers all my needs.

Over-featuring

In this example, the main problem of the product is over-featuring, that is, most of microwave have features no one uses, and which results in an obfuscation of the main functionality most users need.

Understanding how and why your customer hire your product ends up in a better, simpler and even cheaper to produce solution.