Customer Observation Began Today

I’ve done some work with an amazing customer experience consulting firm in NY called Creative Good. Traditional usability testing measures things like “time to complete task”, and requires people to do things they would never do themselves. Creative Good’s method, on the other hand, involves setting a natural context for a customer by figuring out what kinds of tasks they perform on a given website, and then observing them performing those tasks. The results are more natural, because ideally you get a customer behaving as close to how they behave “in the wild” (a.k.a. sitting at home in their underwear.) From those observations, the one or two strategic issues, along with several tactical ones, become clear.

So I used a slight variation of this method today while observing our first set of customers “in the wild” (they were wearing pants.) We’d talked to quite a few customers in our ideal market already, but since people are notoriously bad at telliig you what they want, there’s nothing quite like watching your customers do their thing. It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn from sitting back and observing customers, and how few people do it. Perhaps it is pride (”I know what my customers want”), or shame (”I should know what my customers want”), or even fear (”Holy shit, I have to hang out with my customers?!”)… whatever it is, it is worth getting over so you can sit some customers down and watch them use your product.

Today’s session gave us some really good clarity, and we’ve got more coming up to further refine what we’re doing right and what we need to change before launch.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 11:08 pm and is filed under building edurev, customers, product. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.