Have your customers design the solution, then throw it away
How to get people to tell you what they want without telling you what they want
“I like to eat very healthily, so it’s a mystery why I’m not in better shape,” the interviewee said, pouring a fourth spoonful of sugar into her tea.
Long ago, that story was a cautionary tale in our research team about the mismatch between what people say and what they do. Having users design the solution can result in expensive mistakes. Here’s a way to avoid them.
A few months after joining a new team, I read through a draft interview script written by my manager. It started with the usual preamble about industry experience and daily routines, then added a task:
Imagine your ideal product (to do this job). It can take any form or format. You have five minutes to sketch it, and two minutes to “sell” it to me.
The resultant sketches, for a learning product, were wild:
- One drew an interactive TV
- One drew a robot tutor
- One drew a chair that gave you an electric shock every time you got the answer wrong
After collecting thirty or forty drawings, we noted that what they wanted was qualitative feedback on demand. They didn’t just want to know if they got the answer wrong; they wanted to understand why.
It doesn’t end there.
After the sketch exercise, we asked them questions about their experiences with our product, then asked them to compare our product with their imagined solution.
Interviewees love to please you, so if you ask them about your product, they’ll tell you how great it is.
However, if you ask them about the gap between their dream solution and your product, they’ll point out all its flaws. They’re not criticizing you — of course! — they’re just pointing out what it would do in an ideal world.
Now you have gold dust:
- A list of problems with your existing product
- The attributes their ideal product would have
The product our designers came back with absolutely knocked the socks off the next batch of interviewees. I had never seen a reaction like that before: sheer, enthusiastic delight.
OK, so you don’t have to throw the drawings away: some of them make great conversation pieces and would look lovely on the wall.
Just don’t build exactly what they tell you to. Remember the sugar-lump lady. Users don’t know themselves well, but — thankfully — they know what their problems are.
Written in response to ‘Don’t ask your users to design for you’ by Pavel Samsonov
