There is one little habit I’ve learned this year that has changed everything in my life.

Pause and observe.

We live our life like we are on a roller coaster, and when we fail is because we act on urges without thinking on aproaching the problem strategically. We have an urge to solve problems, and we act on that urge. But are we solving the right problem?

What if instead, we learned to pause and look at that urge from a different angle? What if we stop for a moment to observe people’s interaction with products? Did you ever find yourself or have seen other people reinterpreting the use of a product in a different context?

I started observing and paying more attention to people’s everyday interactions as a contribution to my work as a marketing strategist. This gives me the space to breathe, to think clearly, and make better decisions.

As I was walking on the street I snapped this picture of a young mother and her stroller. She’s not the only mother I’ve seen that has this bag full of essentials hanged on her stroller, ready at hand.

Observing this pattern among mothers, I felt I captured something more interesting than that. Something subtle but powerful for both designers and marketers:

Observation of everyday behavior can help designers and marketers discover what people need in a given context.

This hence the opportunities for designing better products and communicating them to empathize with people’s needs.

Finding a moment to pay attention to the everyday things can help you build products people want and need.

Looking at the picture, I wondered how designers and marketers might be influenced by images like this. This is visual evidence of the realities of products in use and people’s everyday behavior. Might reference to such images help designers and marketers to be more sensitive to people’s experiences and needs? Might observation of behavior in its natural setting help marketers write stronger copy that addresses a real problem? Might observation of behavior help designers to build something people will truly love?

Learning through observation

Observation is a way of learning first hand about the context, habits, rituals, priorities, different contexts of using a product, and values of the people. Once we pause and observe, we notice there is evidence of people’s creativity in reinterpreting or adopting solutions to make up for something that’s missing for them or is poorly designed. It’s just a matter of us paying attention on things like these.

Search for patterns

Empathizing with the challenges that people face in their life is an enormous opportunity to step up and address the problem. Of course, we don’t want to interpret observations too literally. People don’t need a solution to the everyday creative adaptation we see. So solving every problem we observe is not exactly a winning strategy, either. Rather, we want to look for patterns that point to a more common need. When we dig deep enough, we find out that behavior that at first might seem arbitrary or surprising usually has an insightful explanation.

What if, next time when you have a marketing urge, or a product design challenge, instead of acting on that urge, you just notice it, pause and start observing. Your ability to pause and observe will get stronger with practice. And when you have the pause, you have everything.