Customer Visit Workshops
We often hear people say that you can’t ask customers to design your product. I agree. However, I’m a big advocate of having a solid understanding of who is going to use a product and what they’re going to try to do with it – this knowledge can really help you in making design decisions and tradeoffs. Ed McQuarrie has worked with many companies over the years to teach teams how to do effective customer visit programs. His approach is fast and effective. I’ve used it on many projects as a way to quickly gather useful information that can help inform the design process. Ed visited New Zealand in 2007 and 2008 and had such a great time that he’s returning in March 2009. Sandra Lukey is organizing his workshops and her SmartNet events are always high value. There are a few spots left so I encourage my New Zealand friends to take advantage of the opportunity to hear it ‘from the master’. Here’s a link to the flier. The workshops are sponsored by the NZ Government’s TechNZ team – guys who know how to take the long view.
An interesting side note on Ed – while at HumanWare I wanted to expose our product managers to some new ideas on design research. I picked a few books that I thought might be good background – Ed’s ‘Customer Visits’ was one of them. My problem was that a few of the people who’d need to read them were blind, I needed to try to get them on tape. I emailed the authors, some never replied, one said he’d ask the publisher. Ed replied within an hour with the latest edition attached as a word file and granted permission to record it or have it printed in braille – somehow that wasn’t a surprising reaction from the man who understands how to meet customer needs.
