Goals, Needs and Behavior Analysis - this is a new technique that I have added to my repertoire of market research tools. People buy products because they have an underlying need. The need is usually associated with an end goal. While trying to satisfy their needs or when looking for solutions that would satisfy the need, people exhibit behaviors. The danger in designing products is reacting to behaviors without understanding the real need or goals.
To understand this better, here is an example.
Goal: Maintain good health and live long
Needs:
1) I need to exercise at least three times a day
2) I need to get a physical checkup done once a year with a doctor
3) I need to avoid unhealthy food.
Behaviors:
1) I research local gyms and try to get information on their membership. I use the Internet.
2) I visit two or three that I have selected to check out the equipment. I want to make sure they have the equipment I use since I typically tend to use only about 5 equipments.
3) I want to make sure that they are open during early morning and late nights since I typically leave work late. Best time for me to work out might be before I get to the office
4) Want to understand their membership policies because I do not want to get tied into long term contracts and penalties for early cancellations.
5) I call up my doctor and see if I can get physicals scheduled. I typically try to do a month in advance. It would be good if the doctor's office can also draw blood when I am there for the physical since that will save me a lot of time and prevent me from procrastinating in terms of getting the blood test done.
6) I tend to read the nutrition chart whenever I am buying any packaged goods to make sure I understand the fat, sodium and carbohydrate content. I tend to avoid anything with high saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and carbs. I also tend to eat 100% whole grain foods as opposed to enriched foods.
As you can see the needs list can go on. The above example is a pretty generic example, but it illustrates how a single need can usually be derived from many behaviors and how different needs have an underlying goal. It is extremely important that the needs and goals are identified during market research when talking to customers, so that you are very clear on the problems or pain points you are trying to solve.
Once you have identified the behaviors-needs-goals, you derive the requirements for the solution. Each requirement can be evaluated to make sure it satisfies an underlying need which in turn satisfies an underlying behavior. Such an analysis ensures that you are indeed coming with a solution that satisfies an existing problem which is well understood, as opposed to a solution looking for a problem (which technology companies especially are well known for).
Once you solve the problem, the behaviors-needs-goals statements can help you communicate the solution to your customers or prospects in the customer-speak. In fact, this communication becomes a whole lot easier because you can talk directly to the emotions of the customer. They would respect you because of the knowledge you have on what they do and their pain points, as opposed to someone who is merely trying to speak to them in marketing-speak.
I am back attending the first Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas. I was immensely surprised to see how many people (200) were in attendance and the names and the variety of companies in attendance (Microsoft, Intuit, SAP, Boston Celtics, Seattle Seahawks, Lenovo). Heard from some very good speakers (John Hagel and Ben McConnell).
Here are the top 5 things I learnt at the conference:
- It is all about them and not us - If communities are to succeed, first find out why the members would want to be in a community. Take an outside in look first before you figure out how you can benefit from such a community. What value would your members derive from the community your create for them to be active participants in your community? What community service will you be providing?
- Be authentic - If you are running a corporate community, make sure your participation is authentic. Any attempts or suggestions to promote your brand or to feed the community your marketing material is going to be sniffed out very quickly.
- Let go of the steering wheel - Get the community started with some ideas and then let the community members take control and take the community where they want to. Again, it is all about them and not us.
- Be responsive to the community needs - Given that the community will take it wherever they want to, make sure you are responsive to their needs and continue to provide the service they need.
- Allow members to reach their goals - It is not all about your product, but make the community revolve around what makes your members successful. For example, your community members may be using your product to achieve a higher goal. Help them get to that goal via the community, celebrate their successes and watch your community succeed in return.
I have faced this question a lot of times when designing software for product designers? It is very easy to say "let us automate this and that?". Given the state of software development and the number of bugs every software has (just read the report on Boston Globe about US Airways flights being delayed the last couple of days because of glitches in the new upgrade of check-in software), you wonder how far you can take "automation" before it gives a negative ROI?
Don't get me wrong - I love automation. I am a mechanical engineer - I have some idea how my automatic transmission works - but when I am driving my car that is something I just want to work. What about doing charts or calculating trend lines or the myriad of functions in Excel or doing my tax return using Turbotax - I love the fact that this is automated and it just works.
But there is a place for automation as well. It better work all the time, otherwise there is nothing that kills the productivity more because the user will have to first undo what automation "did" and then figure out how to do what he wanted to do in the first place.
Some cases of automation gone wrong is MS Office
1) "paper clip man" - because he tries to get in my way by offering to automate things when I don't need it.
2) When Word offers me to merge reviews together. Given that I have been bitten in the past, I always say No. Because when I am getting multiple reviews from others and if it does anything wrong (and it has), I will have a helluva time undoing what it did and then doing it the way I wanted to do it in the first place.
In CAD (which is digital clay because what you can create is limited only by the user's imagination) I have always felt that automation should always keep the user involved in what it is doing, so that if the computer did something wrong, the user could always correct it and still get the desired results. The latter becomes a lot more harder if the user had got accustomed to the automated way of doing things without having a clue of how automation did what it did. But at the same time, we always talk about removing the CAD overhead for our users and letting them concentrate on their product design. This can be done by making CAD more easier to use and this would require more automation of tedious and "Cadeze" tasks, but we still have lot of work to do here.
I read an interesting blog post by Kathy Sierra on Creating Passionate Users titled "Are our tools making us dumber?". Very interesting read indeed and the 77 comments that it has attracted is worth reading as well to get different perspectives.
One of the principles that guides me in my work is the principle of "My way or the better way". I have repeated this to my peers, my reports, my bosses, my customers .... What I mean by this is that I love feedback on my ideas so that we can collectively make it better. I am not looking for the credit that it was my idea - why? Because our customers who are outside our building do not really care whose idea it is. I tell my colleagues and direct reports that either all of us are going to look like heroes if we collectively solve the customer's problems in the best possible way or look like a bunch of idiots in front of customers. Egos and credits as to who solved the problem does not matter from the customer's perspective. Customers are holding only your company as the responsible and accountable entity and not individual employees of the company.
I have encouraged my peers, my direct reports to constantly challenge my ideas or suggestions so that we can make sure we have looked at a problem from all perspectives and then designed the best possible solutions. All that matters is what "we" (not "I") have done for the customer.
