Understanding the Unsophisticated Consumer While Impaired by Knowledge
On Dec 30th the NYT ran a great story entitled “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike”’ in which Janet Rae-Dupree argued that once you’ve become an expert in a certain field that it’s difficult to relate to those who are not. “This is why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers”. In the book “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in “zero-gravity thinkers” (who are not experts and regularly move from product to product to avoid learning too much about any one product or task) to keep the customer’s needs at the forefront of the development process. The basic premise is that the experts get lost in complexity and refined terminology that allow them to imagine functions and capabilities that are beyond the capabilities for a typical user to grasp, much less utilize.
The inclusion of the “zero-gravity thinkers” requires the experts to back up and explain in layman’s terms what functions are being included in the products and how they would actually benefit and be used by a typical customer. In turn the “zero-gravity thinkers” challenge the ideas with the typical user’s capacity for complexity, in order to ground the development at the level of the target customer, instead of at the level of the engineer who’s probably spent years working on just this one product or even on a particular facet of a complex product. MS Rabe who acts as a “zero-gravity thinker” for Intel acknowledges that initially there can be some friction as the engineers believe that the functions are sufficiently simplified, but with some probing questions, that the group of engineers and the “zero-gravity thinkers” could always come up with some great ideas (that increased the intuitiveness and therefore the usefulness of the products and their functions).
How customer friendly are your company’s products? Do you believe that some of them are over-engineered to the point that they may overwhelm your target customer? Maybe it’s time for a “zero-gravity thinker”?
