Week 4 - Unmet Customer Needs
When we create new products or services, we hope to establish a useful yet beautiful offer that holds new or better features than comparable offers. This offer should add value to the consumer and therefore should be something the potential user needs or aspires to own. This implies that we need to understand the needs and wishes of this user group. To simplify, we can differ between 3 sets of needs: basic, performance and excitement needs (Kano's Needs Model). Basic needs are often not expressed and adding more features that meet this need doesn't necessarily contribute to the customer's satisfaction. Performance needs are expressed often once asked and has an impact on the satisfaction of the costumer. Mostly these needs affect the efficiency of the product by a new architecture or a new added feature. Excitement needs are unmet needs. We could also say: needs the costumer doesn't even know he has yet. Did the humans need more powerful horses, or did they need a car? (Henry Ford) So we need to be able to evaluate what the customer expects, but doesn't express; what he means when he is expressing his needs; and which needs he will have but cannot express yet. And at the same time, the needs are constantly shifting and changing, influenced by internal and external factors, such as mood, financial stability, new innovations in the market etc.
Every innovation influences customer expectations and needs. In the ‘90s, a mobile phone needed to be able to setup phone connections and deliver messages from one device to another. Today, it is normal that the phone features a camera, can connect to the cloud and is rather a portable computer than a simple phone. Not only the expectations changed but also the original purpose of the product have changed and became much more sophisticated. So how can we assess what the customer needs, aspires or what he might need and aspire in the future? Experimentation.
One possible problem with integrating the consumer in the development process occurs when the wrong type of person has been chosen. Is a huge proportion of the potential users UBS asked generally risk averse? Are they early technology adopters that build trust in new products/services quickly or are they rather the "safe buyer" that relies on references?
Human Centered Design or "the Customer-Developer-Co-Creation"
Human Centered Design is nothing new. The idea that the user must be integrated in the development process to iterate the product features, architecture and design jointly has already been raised in research papers in the early '80s. (McCracken& Jackson, 1982; Gladden, 1982)
The idea of human centered design has been applied also in methods such as "the Lean Startup" which emphasises the necessity to test concepts in the early phase of developments in order to be able to change, modify or reconfigure the product if necessary. The motto "fail fast, fail often, fail cheap" is the guideline for young startups that "mock-up" their ideas and test them before even considering entering in the development process. But this experimentational phase where the product is designed in "co-creation" with the potential consumer can also have negative effects:
What if we ask the wrong audience? Just recently, UBS investigated whether reduced ticket flights would trigger consumers to onboard on pilotless flights or not and asked the potential consumers. According to their report, "some 54% of respondents said they were unlikely to take a pilotless flight, while only 17% said they would likely undertake a pilotless flight. Perhaps surprisingly, half of the respondents said that they would not buy the pilotless flight ticket even if it was cheaper". (Theguardian.com)What does that mean? That we should stop the innovation of pilotless flights because apparently consumer wouldn't fly with them?
Also, when the consumer is involved in a design or an ideation process, the point when we integrate him/her is crucial. Surely, the consumer wasn't ready yet to answer the question if s/he would fly pilotless flights. The question is rhethorical because some might still go on a pilotless flight yet, but they don't know yet. What they say and what they do might be two different things. The identification of market readiness for innovations will always be difficult and almost always unreliable when asked directly to a potential user. Human-centered-design becomes essential once prototypes exist to confront the user with the interface and the handling of that product or service. The imagination process needs to be supported by a contextual setting: have the person sit in an airplane (model/simulation) and have him/her listen to the robot announcement made from the cockpit. Is it the word choice, the sound of the voice, the tone that makes the person build confidence and trust in that technology? So the question should rather be: under what circumstances would you go on a pilotless flight? What would the pilotless flight have to offer to you that convinced you to onboard? What shouldn't it have? We can find that out through simulation, testing and experimentation but only once we can give the user options to choose from. So what kind of options do we give this person?
In Human-Centered-Design, you need to immerse yourself into that user group and need to exchange so detailed and deep about their fears, their needs and their wishes, that you understand them. In this "inspiration" phase, you might observe a user in an airplane, their reaction to the captain's announcement and their interaction with personnel on board. What makes the pilot trustworthy and more reliable than a computer? In the "ideation phase" you make sense of what you have learned and develop your solution according to the user's needs. According to designkit, after that, the implementation phase follows. I'd rather say that the iteration and experimentation phase is subsequent and followed, if succesful, by an implementation and and eventual market launch.
See, a startup that wanted to build pilotless drones to transport human beings had maybe given up the idea because they believed in no market readiness for the product. But the question, when developing something different new, should never be whether something would be used or not, but how it would be used and what features would create the desire to use this product and make it engaging?
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