designing experiences
If you want to know what your customers want, you need to ask them. Sounds simple, right?
To learn what one client’s customers want, we are recreating an entire store inside a warehouse. This allows us to test new interactive shopping technologies by observing real customers through hands-on ethnography research.
For another client we went on the road and conducted in-store customer intercepts in four major U.S. cities by observing day to day interactions within transactional environments.
Going to market to ask the customer makes complete sense, yet focusing on qualitative research instead of measurable data is still considered revolutionary, at least outside the design community.
Our findings invariably change the course of our design solutions because they frequently challenge client’s long-held perceptions of performance.
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, is working hard to convince the business sector to look beyond mere numbers and spreadsheets when making decisions.
In the current Harvard Business Review, Martin warns business leaders to start relying more on qualitative market research.
“Although factors such as design and trust can’t be reduced to numbers, they can be interpreted and understood. In fact, only by understanding them…can we predict customers’ emotional responses,” he writes in his article “Don’t Get Blinded By the Numbers.”
We couldn’t agree more.
When a regional fashion chain decided to expand across Canada, we were engaged to conduct in-depth market research to understand the new market.
We chatted on-line with more than 100 shoppers to gain insights into how different age groups in regions across Canada like to shop. Some were so engaged that they send us photographs of their favourite outfits. We even took several people out for shopping trips. The result of all this work is research with a level of authenticity never seen before.
This research not only helped us with the design of the store, the retailer now has a deeper understanding that will pay off in other business decisions, even informing product selection for the regional market.
Businesses also need to better understand their employees. Our firm has designed workspaces for some of Canada’s top companies, and our success is built on understanding what the employees want and need to stay happy and inspired.
One of our teams is right now sifting through more than 100 employee surveys looking into how people are really working within a large Canadian corporation. We discovered that more than half of the employees are ready to embrace a work from home program, much to management’s great surprise.
When it comes to understanding your employees and customers, there should not be any surprises.
http://hbr.org/2011/03/column-dont-get-blinded-by-the-numbers/ar/1
