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How do you control for people's abstract desires not mapping well to what they actually want? Example to illustrate my point: Focus groups over the past 15 ye
by jfindley 8y ago
How do you control for people's abstract desires not mapping well to what they actually want?
Example to illustrate my point: Focus groups over the past 15 years or so have consistently told car mfrs that consumers want larger cars - larger cars are assumed to be more luxurious and associated with financial success, and thus are desirable. The end result is that previous small, manoeuvrable, city cars are now bigger and harder to park. Consumers or small cars are generally unhappy with this trend, as they wanted a small car for the ease of parking etc, but focus groups are frequently insufficiently well tuned to pick up up on this nuance.
My experience in this industry over many years is that users often don't have a clear idea of what they want, and in the cases when they do a non-trivial amount of time it's a so tightly tethered to one special-snowflake usecase that virtually noone else finds value in it.
- ASpring 8y agoThis is why user experience researchers have a job. It's not about asking the user what they want, it's about observing how they work, their problems, their current workarounds, and then building something they need.
- crottypeter 8y agoRe the special-snowflake usecase: there was a Simpson's episode about this where Homer helped create a terrible car: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer
- kakwa_ 8y agoJust like any 90ies Disney movie: Want vs Need We want fancy stuff, or at least stuff that look fancy/luxurious/desirable. If we were rational, small cars is actually what we need (or no car at all in fact, but that's another matter). However I'm wondering if when it came to buying the actual car, people will tend to follow the "need" or the "want" or something in between.