They look at me like I am a nut when I say “I just want to hang out and watch users work for a couple hours.” However I ALWAYS give them insight into how folks are REALLY using their systems.

We are geeks and are much more comfortable being alone with our machines. We make a difference only when we venture into the world our customers are living in.

Awesome post. Thanks.

The more this idea is thought about, the more it seems to be true.
Customers do not always know what they want but they do know what they want when they see makes sense.

Many ideas/inventions only find a market once a initial group has tried it and realized that it was what they were looking for without knowing it.

It’s the classic “Why didn’t I think of that?”.

Michael’s point about prototyping is that it is only through many different iterations and feedback (watching) will you get close to your goal of providing a successful project.

The cleverness is that you have to realize that you don’t know the answer when you start. It is also clever to realize that ideas by themselves are worthless.

Many companies put more value in ideas and innovation than they do observing how customers use their existing products. In fact, many approaches in prototyping are often neglected or completely ignored.

Sometimes a prize idea will gain full funding but flop dreadfully when it hits the market. It is like the company ego is strong enough to fund a loser and even sometimes fund trying to patch the loser instead of realizing that the funding would be better spent on other programs to make sure flops like this are much lesser in scale and something would actually be learned from them.

It illuminates the classic 80/20 rule around what features the users use in Office.

Dave

Thanks for sharing!