Break or make with: Customer

Break or make with: Customer

I got a chance to talk to one of the chief product designer of the company, who was just back from product show in Vegas. We were talking about - if companies give much priority to the end user while designing a product ?

I was in the favor of the point: yes, since customer centric experience and user centric marketing is the fad, companies do give utmost importance to end user while ideating a product. While studying the user behavior, companies tend to be soft towards the majority taste of the user base.

During the conversation he made an interesting point: not necessarily companies need to be in favor of what the market or user wants. They might take altogether a different path than the herd and create a different sector altogether. In which the end user is psychologically forced to move to that sector. He calls it : differential user experience, without the end user engagement in ideation. Breaking from the path but not deviating the from the norm.

According to him: user study says, 80% of the users use clamshell or flip phones in USA. When Apple planned to penetrate into handsets market, instead of favoring user study, they choose to introduce a bar design- iPhone. Apple broke the 'common path of introducing a bar phone. They didn't even bother to be in safer side at least by releasing a clamshell, instead choose to create a new segment altogether in mid-tier handset market with the touch sensitive bar phone. The way iPhone became a instant Jesus phone - it's a history every phone company is envy of !

Incidentally, I came across an interesting read By Greg Nudelman, about -the way to give center stage to customer delight. Meaning, it's reality that design is an ongoing human-to-human partnership between designers and customers who combine forces to reach a common goal. “If they (end users, experience partners) are not involved in the process, they are hardly likely to approve the product. It’s that simple”—Roger Fisher.

But his clarity of this proposition is damn interesting with this statement: The term user leads to sloppy design thinking. “The term users limits us to old ways of thinking about the world we live in and the products we develop.”

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