It’s all about stepping on your customers’ shoes
Paul Bennett gave an interesting talk at TED about how being empathic towards customers can help you spot small things that make a big impact. Time and time again I get amazed by how simple solutions can have such a great impact on a service or product. Companies usually think that innovation is about spending billions in R&D, but sometimes the simple act of stepping on your customers’ shoes to spot simple, yet often overlooked solutions can make a great difference.
Sometimes I tend to think that design consultancies such as IDEO and Engine also play the role of corporate psychotherapists. Companies usually suffer from this ‘process centred’ obsession, and we just step in to make them realise that solutions are quite simple, it’s just a matter of changing the way of how you perceive things. Innovative companies are the ones that manage to make a leap from process centric to customer centric (sometimes with a bit of a help of user-centric psychotherapy)!
May 5, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Awesome post! So many times we think that we innovate for the masses, when really the answer is in the solution of “how can this experience best serve my user”. Visiting the endless numbers of experiences the company WANTS to give the user, many more times, the ‘blinding obvious’ is overlooked. (like the hospital bed example).
I can really appreciate the sensitivity that is becoming more common, where users are part of the design process (whether they know it or not). The state of web 2.0 really does bring this ‘human factor’ into light as we continue to evolve corporate processes.
Thank you for reminding me that in the endless number of solutions we may have, the best ones are always the simplest (and most direct).
May 6, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Hi Irene,
I’m glad that the you are finding inspiration here.
Cheers,
Erick