SXSW: Stop listening to your customers

Brian Steffens, Director of Communications

Sounds counterintuitive in today’s customer focused business culture. Yet people unintentionally lie as they attempt to answer without context, reaching for an answer they think is appropriate.

Nate Bolt of Bolt/Peters User Experience and Mark Trammell, design researcher at Twitter, also believe reliance on traditional website (or other) metrics is unreliable.

If you can’t trust interviews/surveys/focus groups or analytics, how are you going to optimize value to customers?

Bolt and Trammel make a persuasive case to WATCH what consumers do with your product or service, identify what hinders or degrades their experience with your product or service, then work to reduce that friction.

That requires that the customer have something tangible to work with and respond to. It’s incumbent upon the business to put at least a functional prototype in their hands to see and experience the product or service. This goes beyond data collection and analysis to CONTEXT.

The weakness in surveys, interviews and many focus groups is that there is seldom an example of how that person would use the product or service. If Apple had asked random folks if they wanted another mp3 player, we likely wouldn’t have iPods. Ditto the 15 million iPads out there.

People often mischaracterize their experiences. Bolt and Trammell offered an example using Amazon early last decade, when dialup was still prevalent. Folks were asked which of several websites had the fastest download times. After “purchasing” on several sites, they voted Amazon the fastest. But it wasn’t. Amazon was the best shopping experience, but not the fastest download.

What they DO is more important than who they are. The media business is obsessed with demographics, thinking they can sell that to advertisers. And they can. What customers consume, how much, where, when can be informed by demographics , but how a customer or consumer uses your product, service, website or mobile device has much less to do with demographics. It’s much more about form factor, usability, ease of use, intuitive design, simplicity, CONVENIENCE. That experience is much the same for rich or poor, young and old, renters or homeowners.

How many of us in the news media (print or digital) are obsessively focused on how our customers USE our products and services? Not enough of us.

News media, if it’s to serve an informed and enlightened democracy, shouldn’t settle for a niche, highly educated, well-paid audience. News, and movies and several other media still need a mass audience to fulfill it’s mission and, at least for the moment, serve mass market retailers that include supermarkets, department stores, auto companies … Anyone who has a service useful to almost anyone. Even is this age of niche products and targeted messaging, there’s still a vital mass market model out there serving hundreds of millions of citizens.

Trammel used what he claims is a Yogi Berra quote (too good to be true?): Sometimes you can observe a lot by watching.

Trammel followed it with an anecdote: A good catcher doesn’t tell the pitcher what pitch to throw; he tells the pitcher which pitch is working.

Bolt said great ideas come from other great ideas. Imaginative research facilitates invention.

My takeaway: we need a relentless focus on the user experience, to observe how our current form factors hinder their use of our products and services … To understand how others are improving their user experience to woo away our readers and viewers. The challenge is not just about content.

And, we need a relentless focus on the advertiser experience with our products and services. Our competitors aren’t killing us with better content, they’re stealing our readers/viewers and advertisers with a more convenient user experience.

Brian Steffens is the director of communications at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Read his other blog posts here, and talk back at steffensb@rjionline.org and @BrianSteffens on Twitter.