Finding shaped holes & mucking around properly
There is a trend in product design to get to know the needs of the user, to understand their pain points and their needs. To find opportunities. To understand their day to day lives and build products which fit with those lives.
Absolutely all of that is good. You must do that.
So, if you were in doubt you can close this window and go away.
But all of this misses a huge point.
Nobody asked for cars, mobile phones, YouTube or 3D printers. How did we get them?
Presumably you didn’t go away
And that’s because you know there’s more.
While user research and listening to users gives you a huge amount of of insight into what problems you can solve, how to make peoples’ lives better and build the right things, it can blinker you to the step change technologies and products which could transform the world your users live in.
In the 1980s almost nobody was asking for a mobile phone apart from yuppies. The brick phones which went with the briefcase and shoulder padded suit uniform were ridiculed and mocked.
In the 1980s there were no phone shaped holes in most people’s lives.
But slowly the technology changed, the pitch to consumers was refined and the shape which emerged was the shape of the iPhone even though it started as the shape of a brick.
I don’t mean “shape” just physically, although in this case it mattered that the phone was attractive, could fit in your pocket and the screen wouldn’t scratch.
“Shape” is the habit of using it. It’s the shape of the void in your life which you feel after the thing is missing.
If I take your phone away, you will note. This is because society has created a phone shaped hole.
If you wear a watch and take it off, you’ll start noticing a hole in your life. That hole didn’t exist until you had the habit of wearing a watch. This is a watched shaped hole.
Advertisers use this to play into the feelings of voids in your life. A car isn’t just a means of transport. It’s an experience.
Or it’s a statement.
Or a means to express yourself.
Once that connection is made, the car shaped hole is the best way of filling that particular void.
The product has to fill a gap in the mind of the user, whoever they are. And that probably means it has to fit a gap in the perception of the lives of those around the user, whether those are family, friends, peers or colleagues.
By default there are no holes…
In the end we don’t actually need very much. There’s a whole world of writing around lifestyle and downsizing which encourages you to rethink what it is that you want and need from life and focus on what’s going to make the most of your 80ish years on the planet.
Just the idea that you “can’t live without” something or that it’s a “must have” is insane. There are approximately three things I can’t live without: air, water and food. I’m very sure that everything else aside from those three are optional.
And yet…
And yet I have a Spotify subscription, A Netflix subscription, a piano, a lot of books, a fairly fancy oven which doesn’t get enough use, a fish tank, a Raspberry Pi and… lots of other stuff. I have a drum kit for goodness sake.
I don’t really need any of this yet I shop around, buy the subscription, get excited by the new features and it all uses up hours of my life. The same happens in almost all areas of life, whether home or professional. (To take this to it’s logical extreme, you need to think about the myths that Yuval Noah Harari talks about in Sapiens. But that’s a distraction for now.)
All these products and many of the other products we spend our lives choosing aren’t really needed, but are filling product shaped holes.
Until there are product shaped holes
Product shaped holes are invented. They turn things we can live without into things we can’t live without.
For most of the world’s population, the past 100 years has done this to:
- Pen and pencil. 100 years ago the world literacy rate was a little over 20% which meant pen and paper were not product holes to be filled.
- Cars
- Flights
- Light bulbs
- Books
- …
- And then we get to computers at some point
- And then YouTube, Facebook
- And this blog
How do you correct for this?
Let’s roll back to the first question:
But this misses out because nobody asked for cars, mobile phones, YouTube or 3D printers. How did we get them?
We got them, not by listening to customers (as such) but by experimenting. If you were into cars in the early 1900s you were a crack-pot wasting time and your money on something which surely just a dangerous hobby. How could cars possibly go across the remote roads of rural England? (The answer: after a certain point new technology makes us create infrastructure like better roads and 5G; the technology becomes the customer.)
But those early crack pot stages are required to develop the brick phones, crazy cars, websites that nobody uses (until they do) and every technology which is mad (until it’s not).
You have to build stuff and put it out there. And you have to do it again and again because, by definition people won’t get it. If they do, you’re doing the easy stuff.
The discipline to muck around
For “good businesses” who understand life in terms of profit and loss on a clear and current product range, this requires a discipline they are not used to: the discipline to muck around in a productive and challenging way. The discipline to hack something together and the discipline to put it in front of a (potential) customer and shut up and listen to what they say and do.
It takes the financial discipline to put aside a portion of your time and money for this speculative investment.
Unfortunately, mucking around properly is not something most people do well because they approach it like they have to know the answer at the start and that they have to prove themselves right at the end.
If you know the answer, stop. Try something else. You are not being brave enough.
If you are concerned with your own ego, stop. You are not the focus here. The thing you create is the focus.
Good hackathons (and there are bad ones) are a great way of doing this. The challenge and focus of creating something from nothing and then presenting it is proper, challenging mucking around.
Finding holes
In order to do this in teams, companies or on your own you need to do this at least a few times because you will miss steps the first few times. Typical steps people miss are:
- Just observing people doing some normal activity for a while and noting the cost to them in time, money or emotion
- Learning about technology with no agenda in mind. This is your toolkit. You need more of it.
- Sketch ideas. Get good enough at this that you can sketch an idea in about 20mins which you can come back to. (This is important because not all ideas are ready to be done today.)
- Set aside time and money. Expect to lose both because this is high risk, high reward. (High chance of losing it, high return if you don’t.)
- When it’s nearly time, prepare. Have a plan. Be really fast at putting this down and be able to adjust it. Don’t spend weeks doing this. If you are, you aren’t organised enough about your information.
- When it’s time to play: focus. Stop everything else.
- When you’re done, hand it over to someone and (THIS BIT IS REALLY HARD — almost nobody I know can do this) shut up and listen
- Do a retro and keep it somewhere: what worked, what didn’t, what do you need to change?
It’s really hard. Good luck.
Dan Frost | TheLeanCTO.com to startups and the ambitious; Tech lead in R&D in edtech at Cambridge Assessment; enthusiast of ideas, podcaster, writer at thebaseline.co.
Follow me on twitter — https://twitter.com/danfrost. Or say hello in the comments.
