Designed for the Rest of Us

Companies all over the world are looking for ways to be disruptive, especially in these times of economic uncertainty (read ‘opportunity’). The disruptive term was coined in 1997 by Clayton Christenson in his seminal book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, if you haven’t read it you’re in luck – go straight to his second book from 2003 ‘The Innovator’s Solution’ and read it instead because it explains how to get disruptive. There is a real nugget of gold on page 75 where Clayton introduces what I have always found to be a sure fired path to innovation – looking at the customer and the job they’re going to do with your product.

Here’s the key – get out and understand what people are actually doing with your product. Look at the problems they have and probe behind these to figure out what really matters to them. They’ll tell you lots of things, and they’ll tell you what they want (free, lots of features, delivered yesterday). However, this is not what’s really useful, as it is your job to figure out what they really need. If you do a good job on this, you’ll identify their ‘unmet needs’.

There are other paths to disruption, but this one is a low risk approach. Identifying the unmet need is the challenge and I recommend Anthony Ulwick’s outcome-driven approach. Another major advantage is this is a great method to get an interdisciplinary team started on working together by focusing on a clear understanding of the customer.

I’ve used this approach on a lot of projects, I learned it at Apple, then applied it at Palm, Sun, Microsoft, SPIE, Navman, HumanWare, and a host of lesser known companies.

Of course, this is just one approach to innovation, equally important is making sure you foster innovation in technology, but that’s a future post.

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.