For most design engineers, the public answer is most likely "yes." The reality, though, may be a little more nuanced than that. Customers can’t tell you how to innovate. Often, they have trouble expressing their needs. They could never have told Steve Jobs years in advance that they needed user interfaces like those that eventually appeared on the iPhone or iPad.
"Customers don’t solve problems," noted George Land, founding partner of a strategic innovation company called the Farsight Group, during a recent interview with Design News. "They merely identify their needs. They don’t have any idea how to solve your [design] problems."
Still, customer innovation is a critical part of the design process, and experts are increasingly citing its importance in good design. Take, for example, the new Cadillac CUE, an automotive center console that you’ll hear more about in an upcoming issue of Design News. During the design of the CUE, 40 Cadillac engineers and designers rode with more than 120 potential customers to learn how center consoles are used. They rode home with them from the dealerships when they picked up their cars. They traveled with them on sales calls. They sat in the backseats with their kids and dogs. They even joined them while they were on vacation.
To develop Cadillac CUE, 40 GM engineers and designers rode with more than 120 customers. (Photo courtesy of Cadillac)
For Cadillac, the idea was to understand their customers’ needs and frustrations. The company’s engineers didn’t simply want to take the usual design approach -- which was to examine competitors’ trends, put together a rough concept, and hand it off to the graphics design team to make it look pretty. They wanted to build their new product from the ground up, based on feedback from customers.
That might seem like a sensible, and maybe even obvious, way to design a new product. Often, however, that’s not the way it’s done. During CUE’s development, many GM executives wondered aloud about the wisdom of investing in such an expensive design process (GM was nearing bankruptcy at the time). Some asked, “You want to do what? You want to ride along with people?”
In truth, there are often good reasons for not taking the kind of deep dive exemplified by Cadillac’s CUE. Such efforts may be time-consuming. They may be expensive. And -- this may be the most important reason -- no one can guarantee they will work.
But Land argues that customer feedback can have tremendous value, given the proper approach. He advocates training the customers, as well as the design engineers, to ensure that the feedback is worthwhile. He cites an example of the automotive electronics giant, Delphi Corp., which "trained customers in creative thinking and then stimulated them to get as wild and dreamy as possible," in an effort to design a better electronic control system. Land said that Delphi questioned six customer groups -- each numbering about 20 people -- and then followed those sessions with a process called "deep needs analysis."
Cadillac (which did not work with Land) used a similar process. After spending hundreds of hours with customers, engineers and designers wrote their observations on sticky notes and placed them on a conference room wall. Team members then "walked the wall" and scribbled their thoughts on a pie chart that rated users from young to old and tech-savvy to tech-averse. Only after all that analysis did the team start to get a better handle on what features their new product should have.
Based on the customer feedback and ensuing analysis, Cadillac’s team decided to use forward-looking technologies, such as a capacitive touch screen, haptic feedback, and proximity sensing. In retrospect, the technologies now seem obvious, but at the time (the iPhone hadn’t even reached the market when GM engineers made their decisions), the choices seemed daring. Whether those choices will resonate with consumers is still unknown, since CUE won’t reach the market until 2012.
The key to success in such endeavors is to attack design problems from fresh perspectives, Land said. "The problem is that we all build a bunch of assumptions that lock us into a way of thinking," he told us. "Getting out of that requires people who don’t know anything about the problem and can bring new viewpoints."
Key insights in this wonderful story, about how the role of the customer in the design process is able to be coherently articulated in the post-Jobsian world. Unlike the old MS line from the early 1990s -- "We'll ship it when our customers say it's ready" -- the presents the correctly nuanced view that customers are a key PART of the design process but they shoudn't DRIVE the design process.
Good story, Chuck. I'm curious to know whether these efforts ended up paying off in design efforts that would not have occurred without the customer interaction. I'm also curious about whether the engineers and designers witnessed behavior that varied from what they understood from their own behavior in cars.
Do you know if this practice occurs in other industries? The movie industry famously tests its plots and particularly it endings on audiences.
Rob: The observations definitey led to a design that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Their choice of capacitive touch, for example, was based on the fact that some users had problems with other types of screens. Also, the design uses only four physical (non-software) buttons, as opposed to between 14-18 on most such screens. That was done because users complained there were too many buttons. And, yes, they definitely witnessed behaviors different from their own. They said one woman put dozens of sticky notes on her dashboard to remind her of how everything worked. Another driver said she didn't want her e-mail read aloud to her while the kids were in the car, so they incorporated that feature.
Interesting to hear that the effort was productive. I think half the battle is just to be conscious of what customers need. I used to travel a great deal in the 1990s, which meant using a lot of rental cars. One thing that came clear was that Japanese cars were more comfortable. Nothing in the driver's compartment seemed to get in my way. With most American cars, I felt like I was elbows and knees, bumping into everything as I got in and out of the car. With the Japanese cars, everything seemed to be in the right place, easy to reach.
I always suspected that Japanese designers were paying more attention to the interaction between the driver and the compartment.
In the outboard engine industry, customer experience is paramount. It's common for engineers to get out in the field with customers, dealers, and service personnel. It's very dangerous for engineers and designers to be barricaded in engineering. There is no substitute for a dose of reality - and, when you make recreational products, the ultimate reality is the customer's experience. I can't say we always get everything right - and sometimes we've gotten things colossally wrong - but we do try very hard to make the customer experience the best in the world.
Great story, Chuck. I think customers absolutely have to be part of the process in terms of vetting requirements and garnering feedback. The danger, as all of you well noted, is having the customer drive the product development effort. That gets dicey because as Steve Jobs well noted, customers can't envision the next great product innovation. They can tell you what they like and don't like regarding existing capabilities, but they can't see the future.
Good point, Beth. Customer feedback is great from the standpoint of finding out what they think works or doesn't work, but the designer is the one making the future product.
It's also worth mentioning that design engineers say they need to be careful in the kind of information they take from consumers. Consumers often don't know what they want and several designers told us they worry about customers "giving answers that they think we want to hear." Cadillac's engineers and designers made a point of sitting in the back seat and quitely watching, rather than asking questions.
What The Cadillac design team did was excellent Market research, and is exemplary of what every new product development effort should tackle, but seldom does.The “end-users” of the product will intuitively know what works for them, and will always have suggestions like; “It would be great if you had a gizmo that could ….. “.These types of suggestions are considered “need-based” and not necessarily innovation solutions; rather just problem statements.Our job as the design (and market-research) teams is to embrace those needs and then invent the innovation solutions.What mature design engineers and seasoned market research professionals need to look past, are the silly comments made by the focus-group-participants.For example, during one long-past focus study group I managed before the commercial release of Smart-Phones (circa 2002) we provided one real working smartphone prototype, plus 3 other non-working balsa-wood industrial design models offering various form-factor solutions.Without exception, every group participant commented on how much more desirable the light-weight design models were, over the actual working prototype.Well, duh.But the message was clear. The all liked “lighter” over the actual clunky working prototype.If nothing else, it pointed the design efforts of the subsequent years into more exotic and lighter materials.All good inputs.All good things.
@JimT: The actual interpretation of what users are saying about what they actually want and need in a product is the gold standard, as you well point out, Jim. I think that's the best practice that really differentiates the Cadillac Design Research Team and the smart phone example you cited. It's a great skill to be able to translate those subtle nuances around behavior and what wasn't said into tangible product requirements and innovations that resonate as opposed to being sidetracked by the obvious wish-lists and complaints that customers actively verbalize.
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