Our IdeaWorks

Are You Asking Customers the Right Questions

admin — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 22:25:41 +0000

Whether you are a Lean Startup junkie, a Design Thinking guru, or any other human-centered innovation practitioner, you know that getting out to customers early and often is required, in order to discover real problems, hidden needs, and unique customer-generated solutions. One of the easiest techniques is the customer interview.

Once you have embraced the need to connect to customers with primary, face-to-face research,

How do you ask questions in a way that gets you the rich information and insights you are looking for?

How do you get responses that tell you what you need to know vs. what you want to hear?

You may not know the right questions to ask at first. You may reach a few dead ends and have to re-shape your questions a couple of times or ask things slightly differently with different people. But oh, when you hit it right, the flood gates will open and you will be awash with stories, seminal quotes, testimonials, product suggestions, new connections, and more. Here seven tips to help you shape your customer research questions:

1) Avoid yes/no questions

The problem with yes/no questions is that your interviewees can give you one-word answers and be done. You want to hear more from them. If you ask a question like “Would you buy this?” someone may answer “yes” to be polite. Or they may say “no” for a variety of reasons, one of which might be the truth. Once a person answers “yes” or “no,” he or she will unconsciously steer all his or her other comments to “justify” the yes/no choice. It’s human nature. Even a follow-up “why or why not?” may not work. Your goal is to get the interviewee to think expansively, not to narrow into a decision, and certainly not to focus on pleasing you. (Yes, of course, you really want to know whether this customer—or or anyone, for that matter—wants to buy what your selling. But asking the question doesn’t get you there.)

2) Get people to tell you their stories

You want to know about people’s problems and frustrations as well as their favorite solutions. You want to know about the needs people have for products that haven’t been invented yet. The best way to do this is to get people to tell you their stories. For example, if you are planning to open an online toy store, you might ask: “Tell me about your experience shopping for your kid’s toys.” Another way might be “describe the last time you shopped for your kid’s toy.” Any question that begins with “tell me about a time when…” invites the customer to tell you a story. The beauty of a story is that it provides the context, the surrounding situations, the frustrations and delights that your customers have experienced, and how they behaved to solve their problems. Stories are gold mines of information.

3) Dig deeper

Even when you ask someone to tell a story, they may talk in generalities and stereotypes. If this is the case, you want to dig deeper and encourage people to give details. Ask follow-up questions. Here’s a situation where the “why” question may work. (“Why is it that you were shopping in Target at 10 PM on a weeknight?”) “How” works as well. (“How did you know that your kid was about to melt down?”) Or “can you give an example of…?”

4) Find out about alternates

Not only do you want to know details that relate to the business you’re going after. You want to know what people are doing, buying, using, or making instead. Your assumption may be that people will buy from you if your product, service, or site is more usable, cheaper, better, more attractive, or more well known than your competition. That may not be the case. You want to find out what else people are spending their time or money on, what they value. In the case of the online toy store, you may ask “What other sorts of things have you purchased for your kids in the past few months?” Or, “What do you tell people who ask you what to buy for Johnny’s birthday?”

5) Tap into the vision

Some innovation experts claim that you can’t ask customers what products to build. There’s the famous quote attributed to Henry Ford that says “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Funny story about that quote. It appears that Henry Ford never said it. More importantly though, the real problem is that it isn’t the right question. If you ask “what do you want?” you may not get a reliable answer. But you can tap into the vision of your customers with creative questions that stretch their imaginations. Here are a couple of samples: “Describe for me an ideal scenario for bathing suit shopping.” “Imagine it is 2040. How do you think your children will be paying their bills when they get to be adults?” “What might the perfect toy emporium look like?” Answers to these questions may not point directly to a product or service concept. But they will provide you with valuable insights to inform your design.

6) Shut up. And listen.

There are two parts to this one. “Shut up” means that right after you ask your brilliantly worded, probing question, be silent. Give the interviewee time to think through their answer. Let them start talking, double back, re-think what they’ve said, ramble some more and proceed. When they stop – wait a few seconds before probing more. Sometimes people will start up again. If your interviewee is stopped or stuck, you may want to dig deeper, but again, keep your question succinct. An example to get them thinking is great, but don’t go off on your own story. Part two: Listen. It stands to reason that if you are asking open-ended questions, you will be getting unpredictable answers. Your job is to truly open your heart and mind to what other person is saying, even if they are totally destroying your business concept. Don’t dive into defend yourself or to “correct” their insights. (Believe me, it is very tempting).

7) Ask the crucial final question . . .

You’ve had an eye-opening, productive interview. You’ve wrung every great insight and reaction out of your interviewee. Next? Do not forget to ask “Who else should I be speaking with?” This question is crucial for a few reasons. First of all, it gets you a warm lead or leads for your next interview. Second, it gives you clues as to how the person perceives your subject area. Are they sending you to industry people? Experts in education? Older people? Teens? This is very telling information. Third, as people think through an answer to this question, very often, a spark will go off in their heads, and they will come up with a new thought or insight in answer to one of your previous questions! That spark may very well be the most useful one of the whole interview. Pretty cool, huh? Try it.

Final Thoughts

If you ask customers the right questions and you listen well, you will find that just about every interview provides value. Whether the customer confirms your assumptions about their needs, validates that you’re building a great solution, or causes you to rethink your direction, you will learn something new to attach to your previous understanding. Remember, the interview is about THEM, not about YOU. Don’t be too precious with your interview questions. If one of them isn’t working, drop it. There’s no “extra credit” for asking more questions. Go for quality, not for quantity. Here’s a challenge: commit to ten customer interviews and see where it leads you. And let me know how it worked for you. Would love to hear your thoughts.

What Is Design Thinking- Is This Innovation’s Panacea

admin — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 22:20:42 +0000

When I first heard the term “Design Thinking” it tied my brain into knots. What did it mean? To my mind, “design” is either a verb or a noun. As a verb, it means either to create or execute an idea, or to conceive a plan. As a noun, a “design” is the result of such a creation, execution or plan. It can be a drawing, a blueprint, or a work of art. We know what “design” is. But “design thinking?” It is thinking about design? Or thinking like a designer?

I then heard that design thinking is taught at Stanford University’s d.school, an ϋber cool place you go to instead of B-School for a more multi-disciplinary and creative approach to problem solving. Stanford graduate students from multiple disciplines attend d.School as do executives from across the world, who can attend “Design Thinking Boot Camp: From Insights to Innovation.”

I had heard that the design thinking approach is tied up with such creative places as Apple, and Nike, and IDEO – the design firm that put the buzz in the “design thinking” buzzword. I knew that “design thinking” is a customer-centered approach that embraces ethnographic observation, iterative prototyping, and the use of multifunctional teams in the process—a trio of my favorite practices. And “design thinking” is focused on action. But if “design thinking” is focused on “doing,” then why don’t they call it “design doing?” “Thinking” is too cerebral an activity. “Doing” gets stuff accomplished. Someone needs to create a new term for this. Leaving all that aside …

Defining Design Thinking

Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO, which is at the center of the design thinking movement, has given us this definition: “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Embedded in Brown’s definition are the components of People, Technology, and Business. Successful innovation lies at the intersection of these three forces:

Key Elements of Design Thinking

The generally agreed upon model for Design Thinking includes five phases. Note that although the process appears to be linear, it is actually highly iterative.

Empathizing with the user
The model begins with getting out to the users and observing their environments, their behavior, and their needs, that is, “ethnographic observation.” Rather than begin with a problem statement developed from senior management, for example, you go out and listen to users. You probe beyond typical market research questions and pat answers to uncover insights, emotions, stories, and motivations.

Defining the problem
The next phase in design thinking takes cross-functional and iterative approach to defining the problem to be solved. A cross-functional approach allows varying perspectives, encouraging both creative and analytical approaches. Iterations promote continual connections with users.According to Fast Company, this process involves “relentless questioning, like that of a small child. Why? Why? Why?” It is through this process that the underlying issues are determined.

Albert Einstein famously said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Care and focus on the problem is an important element of design thinking. Most of the time, people are focusing on the wrong problem.

Ideating
“Ideate” is another one of those words that confound at cocktail parties. Is that like “brainstorming?” Yes and no. It is about generating as many ideas as possible, as is brainstorming, but it is specifically aimed at generating ideas that address the problem at hand. The focus here is on generating a lot of ideas and embracing the understanding that many will be mistakes.

Prototyping
Prototyping rapidly follows on the heels of ideating. Prototypes are not lengthy exercises in engineering, but rather quick ways to get feedback on whether a proposed solution truly meets the need of the user. In selecting which ideas to prototype, the experts recommend choosing based on potential, not just feasibility. After all, if the prototype does not solve the user’s problem, what good is feasibility?

Testing
The team repeatedly brings their prototypes out to users for feedback. Based on feedback, the team will iterate by updating the prototype, going back and ideating, re-framing the problem, or even going back to additional qualitative user research (the “empathize” phase).

Iterations are Key

As with other customer-centered, rapid prototyping approaches, iteration is a key component of the design thinking approach. Because you are continually focused on getting out and testing prototypes with users, you will get continued feedback that you can use to shape or radically change your ideas.

In this sense, design thinking shares a lot with the Lean Startup methodology and its build-measure-learn feedback loop. Design thinking, however, is more a process about defining the problem to be solved and determining a product direction. The lean startup methodology can be used as follow-on—to pair ethnographic observation, known as “empathize” in design thinking and “customer development” in lean startup—with agile product development, where the prototypes increase in fidelity and become products, complete with validated business models.

Is Design Thinking All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

It turns out that the label given to “design thinking” is but one of the concerns people have with this method. Bruce Nussbaum, one of design thinking’s biggest initial proponents and frequent Fast Company contributor, wrote this:

For all the gushing success stories that we and others wrote, most were often focused on one small project executed at the periphery of a multinational organization. When we stopped and looked, it seemed like executives had issues rolling out design thinking more widely throughout the firm. And much of this stemmed from the fact that there was no consensus on a definition of design thinking, let alone agreement as to who’s responsible for it, who actually executes it or how it might be implemented at scale.

Beyond the definition, however, is the perception. Many people perceive design thinking as part of the “creative camp” and not the “business camp.” If “design” and “business” are in two separate camps, there is already an organizational culture problem. Nussbaum correctly points out that companies that have achieved success, such as Procter & Gamble and General Electric are those that have shaped the design thinking model to fit their internal cultures.

Another Fast Company contributor, Helen Walters of the Monitor Group’s Doblin Innovation consultancy, reminds us in a recent article that “Design thinking is Not Design.” In this business climate, any process needs to be able to demonstrate understanding of, and sensitivity to, concerns of the c-Suite. “Fuzziness is not a friend here,” says Walters, and “designers should do everything they can to demonstrate that they have an understanding of what they’re asking, and put in place measurements and metrics that are appropriate and that can show they’re not completely out of touch with the business of the business.”

Whether or not design thinking is the panacea everyone has been searching for, few of us would doubt that successful innovations lie at the intersection of People, Technology, and Business.

Make the decision for yourself as to whether design thinking is your cup of tea, and in the spirit of doing and not just thinking, grab a colleague or two and attend Stanford University’s Design Thinking Virtual Crash Course.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Innovation Is A Lot Like Stand-Up Comedy

admin — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 06:20:09 +0000

Innovation is serious business. The lifeblood of your company depends on your ability to serve the changing world with new products and services while continuing to generate profits. What does this have to do with comedy? Turns out there are a lot of similarities.

There is, after all, a process….
In creating a stand-up comedy act, you follow a process. There are comedic formulas to help you create jokes as well as a process for shaping and filtering jokes, assessing your audience, building your act, planning your debut and charting a path to potential comedic success.

In innovation, you follow a process. You likely have a set of practices for generating and filtering ideas, assessing your market, building your product, planning your roll-out, and forecasting potential success.

Yet, there is loads of failure….
Consider this. It is estimated to take 80 hours to produce three minutes of standup comedy material. Eighty hours. Out of those three minutes of material, maybe there is one “good” minute that survives the beta test in front of a live audience. That’s one minute of output for 4800 minutes of effort, or 0.02% success. A stand-up comedian puts together his or her set minute-by-minute, discarding scores and scores of failed jokes until he/she gets to the precious few that work. And they don’t always work. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most successful comedians of all time, said in a December 23, 2012 interview “I try different things, night after night, and I’ll stumble into it at some point, or not. If I love the joke, I’ll wait. If it takes me three years, I’ll wait.” That’s a lot of failure. Most people give up.

In innovation, you generate a lot of ideas and sift through them. Only a few of them survive the initial weeding out period. A selection of ideas may be fleshed out further and even prototyped. Even fewer ideas progress to the development phase, and even after the sifting and shaping, many ideas do not pan out in the marketplace. That’s a lot of failure. Many new products bomb.

You don’t know what will work until you put it out there….
Ask any standup comic about the road to success. The answer? Two simple words: “Stage Time.” There is no training program, no tip or trick better than getting out on stage and trying out your material.

So too with launching a new product or service. You can forecast sales and adoption rates, but you never really know the true success rate until you put it out there. (That is why the “Lean Startup” approach of testing your assumptions by putting things into the marketplace makes so much sense.)

And context matters….
Your stand-up set may have the college crowd rolling in laughter, but try the same jokes at your hometown senior center and you are likely to bomb. Success depends not only on the comedic genius of your material, but also on the intersection of your unique essence with the hearts, minds, and needs of your audience, and whatever is happening out there in the world.

As with comedy, successful innovation is about context, marrying your company’s unique capabilities with your customers’ hearts, minds and needs as well as whatever is happening out there in the world. There is a great distance between a near miss and a perfect hit, and often success is a matter of timing—hitting just when the market is ripe for your innovation.

Passion and determination are key….
Hard work and discipline are givens. The ability to handle failure and keep going is crucial. Beyond all of this is the sense of passion required. In comedy, without passion there is no connection to your audience. And without connection, there is no laughter. Without laughter, there is no comedy.

Passion is important in innovation as well. Passion helps you power through even when the work is boring or taking longer than you thought, when others are giving up, or when you’ve hit a snag. Passion keeps you connected to your customers.

Success, when you achieve it after all that hard work, is all the sweeter—and that’s no joke.

5 Lessons Startups & Enterprises Can Learn From Each Other

admin — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 21:50:00 +0000

Entrepreneurs are continuing to launch startups at a rapid pace, and the majority continue to fail. At the same time, large companies are looking to increase their innovative activity to remain competitive, and many have turned to investing in new ventures or establishing innovation centers in order to gain a foothold on the emerging technology landscape. Startups and Enterprises often have romantic notions about how easy it is for the other to thrive. There has been a lot of talk about having the right “DNA” to be successful (we used to call it “company culture.”) The truth is, there is a lot that startups and enterprises can learn from each other. Here are the top ten.

The top five lessons enterprises can learn from successful startups

Failure is a given

Startups often know that the early stages include a lot of experimentation and that the assumptions about such things as customer buying behavior, business models for success, and the ability to build and ship the product are often incorrect. Successful startups keep trying even after early failures.

Play to Win

At any given time there are likely to be a few competitors with the same or similar business ideas. Competitive analysis is very important. However, startups who become too obsessed with looking over their shoulders at the competition’s every move may be too slowed down. Successful startups lay out their unique value proposition, stick to their message, and go out to win—on their own terms.

Passion

Most successful startup owners have intense and continued passion for their business. Being able to pursue one’s vision keeps that passion alive. You know a passionate founder when you see him or her driving an eight-year-old clunker of a car. Yes, they may have made enough money to buy a fancy car, but they often have neither the desire nor the time to drop what they’re doing and go after a vanity purchase.

Ownership of Outcomes

The currency of success and failure for startups is real. If their products or services don’t sell, or if their costs go through the roof, they may deplete their reserves and have to close up shop. Passing the buck or blaming someone else for a mishap doesn’t do much good. Therefore, startups tend to take ownership and accountability for the outcomes of their work.

Measure Revenue

Revenue is a crucial metric to a startup. It means that someone will buy their product. Startups may not yet be turning profits, but if they have paying customers, they have great incentive to manage their costs and cash flow to stay in business.

The top five lessons successful startups can learn from entrepreneurs

While startups have the courage and energy that most large enterprises lack, they are often challenged to sustain and scale their businesses. Here are five lessons startups can learn from enterprises:

Infrastructure Support

If you work in a large company, chances are great that you got your computer set up, that someone else handles the billing, the accounts receivable, the HR policies, the marketing, advertising, finance, and operations. This structure allows people who excel at various tasks to do what they know and like best. For startups, various support activities should be outsourced or delegated (as they are in large companies) so that the startup can focus achieving the vision.

Marketplace understanding

The most successful businesses allocate resources to keep up with what is happening in the marketplace, unlike startups, who oftentimes do not have resources and may not even be clear on the marketplace where they are playing. As a result, large businesses may be able to distinguish between a fad vs. a trend vs. a tectonic shift.

Due Diligence

Enterprises often have trusted, in-house resources who are familiar with their business and can advise on legal matters. While startups should not be excessively looking over their shoulders at the competition, they should make sure they have adequate legal support as well as the necessary patents and trademarks in place.

Project Management

Although project management is often maligned as drudge work, it is an important part of any operation, new or sustaining, as it provides key visibility into where things are on track or not as well as key insights to help plan for future initiatives. Being lean and agile does not mean that project management goes out the window. Large companies tend to have established processes and practices around project management

Measure Profits

Because large companies must demonstrate their ability to be profitable to shareholders, owners, or their board, they need to consider not only revenue, but profits as well. Profits provide an important measure of sustainability and business viability. They may point to areas where costs are out of control or prices charged for goods and services are too low.

These are both challenging and exciting times, filled with a world of opportunity for startups and enterprises alike. Opportunities can multiply when startups and enterprise are able to apply the lessons of each other.

Lean Customer Research® is more than Trolling Starbucks

admin — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 16:39:00 +0000

Lean Customer Research® is more than Trolling Starbucks for Captive Customers

With the focus on “getting out of the building” as soon as possible and validating ideas with customers a la “the lean startup” approach, researchers often hit up the nearest Starbucks.

Starbucks happens to be a good place to find people to interview. Many people are parked there, mooching off the free wi-fi and monopolizing the power outlets. They feel guilty that they’ve been sitting there for a couple of hours when all they got was a $6.00 cup of coffee, and they are often happier to entertain someone else’s need than continue the work in front of them. So, yes, you may get 5, 10, even 15 minutes of someone’s time.

But are these the people you need to interview? And is this the best context for your inquiry? Is an interview the best way to get at your information? Are you set up to get the information you need?

Step 1: Who are the “right” people to interview?

Whose problem/whose insight are you hoping to tap into? (Hint: if you say “everyone” you are likely to be thinking too broadly about your target population.) How narrow or how rigid your requirements are depend on your product/service idea or your vision. With Lean Customer Research® you can fine-tune your approach as you go along. Sometimes you discover a market that is totally different from your initial assumption. But you need to start somewhere. Just keep at it.

Here are some examples of quick targets:

People who have between 25 and 50 pounds to lose who have tried diets/exercise before and haven’t been able to lose weight, but will invest in a solution if they think it will work.
Working professionals around 30 years old who are concerned about managing their expenses
Brides who are looking for unique themes and destinations for their weddings
Senior citizens who live independently and have a hard time remembering which pills to take at different times of the day
Purchasing agents who need to find the right combination of packaging tape and corrugated boxes for the mix of products being shipped.

Step 2: Where are these “right” people?

Once you have defined your key target market, think about where they would be likely to hang out (either online or offline), and when. It should be clear to you that not everyone you need to connect to will be in Starbucks. A mother of a toddler may be at the playground in the morning. A teenager may be in that same playground at night. You may find people at a trade association meeting, an online forum, a LinkedIn group, or a senior center. As with your discovery of the “right” people, your discovery of where to find them may evolve as you go along. Just keep at it.

Step 3: What do you need to know?

What is the most important thing you need to find out? You probably have a number of questions, but focusing on the one or two major findings you are hoping to uncover is a good way to begin.

Step 4: What is the best method to get this information?

Is a face-to-face interview the best way to get the information you are looking for? Maybe observation, a brief telephone interview, or anonymous online testing will get at what you want to know. Say you want to know about what people would like to eat at the pancake shoppe. You can ask people about what types of things they’d like to see on the menu. Or you can observe what people order, how they eat, what they layer on their food, whose plate they nip tastes from. Obviously, you will get different sets of information from interviews vs. observations.

Step 5: Get out there and listen. And learn as you go.

You can start with one approach and switch mid-stream. No one is judging you, evaluating, or testing you on the purity of your methodology. Your real objective is to learn, to test the assumptions on which your business model or idea is based. The most important thing is to be honest with yourself and open to the insights you get from doing the research.

You can design and conduct more formal research as warranted. (I would be thrilled to help you if that’s what you need. Call me!) But if “Lean Customer Research® is your approach, keep it simple, keep refining as you go along, and just keep at it.

Where are you finding research participants? I’d love to know.

Why I Love Moderated Usability Research – A Short Story

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 21:34:57 +0000

VP Sally (not her real name) was asked by her boss to “borrow” me in order to help them get to the bottom of the uproar caused by a recently installed system for expense reporting and supplies ordering in the company. How could a little, incidental piece software for ordering pens, pencils, and staplers cause so much trouble? I set up a quick usability research project —I would interview a few people, have a look at the site itself, and observe users. There was so much low-hanging “findings fruit” to be gathered from just playing with the site itself, I could have stopped there, written up the report and gone back to my own work. I decided to press on with observations, and it was here that I had the experience that would shape my views on the value of moderated research.

I sat with Janey (not her real name, and incidently, all of my fictional characters are Susie, Janey, Sally, or Allison). Janey was an executive assistant who needed to order supplies, and she showed me how she used the system. The first thing she did was retrieve a marble notebook from the bin above her desk. She turned to a page in the book with a handwritten list of notes.

“What is that,” I asked.

“Well, it’s too hard to find things, so I look up what I need to buy in the catalog and then write everything here [in the marble notebook] so I can have it before I log on.” The catalog she referred to was a 2-inch thick printed supplies catalog, also stored in the upper bin.

In pencil, in the notebook, was a neatly printed list of item numbers, items and quantities.

“It’s also good in case I have to look back in the notebook and see what I ordered the last time,” Janey added.

Janey logged onto the system, typed in her order exactly as it appeared in the notebook, then saved the order as a template.

“So, you’re saving this as a template? Why is that?”

“Because it always times out after I’ve typed everything in, and then you lose everything. If I save it as a template, I don’t have to re-type everything.”

“Do you ever go back to re-use the templates?”

“No, it’s too hard to find.”

Janey showed me the list of templates she had created over the past six months. There were more than 40 of them, listed by date, with titles that were not standard or descriptive of the contents.

Janey got a phone call during our session. While she was on the call, she kept clicking around on the page she was on. Nervous tick, I thought.

“I noticed you were pressing some keys” I said.

“Oh yes, if I don’t hit the keys I time out and lose everything. Now I have to order something that wasn’t in the catalog. My boss wants one of those large wall calendars. I’m pretty sure they have them at this company. I’m going to have to search…”

So, Janey searched on the system. Search took a loooong time and finally returned 20 pages of results. Janey looked at page one and then closed the search.

“It’s not there,” she proclaimed.

“Did you notice the other pages of search results?*”

“Huh?”

“There were more pages of results. You only checked the first page.”

“Really?”

Janey went back and discovered that 20 pages were visible on the bottom and she could click through.

Janey found something close to what she needed, but it said “restricted” so she didn’t order it.

“What does ‘restricted’ mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Either it’s restricted by the system? Or we’re not allowed to order it because of our level? Or it’s too expensive for us to buy? It doesn’t matter. I’ll just go out at lunch and buy it at the store. I can put it on my card and voucher it.”

Janey finally clicked “submit.” She got 30 errors – 3 for each item ordered.

“Now I go in and enter these three pieces of information for every item,” she told me.

They were the same 3 pieces of information—on every item, on all 40+ orders she’d processed, on every item that everyone in that building had ever ordered for the past six months.

“And you retype the information for each item, each time you place an order?”

“Yes.”

Later that day, I sat with someone else, let’s call her Susie. Susie revealed to me that “there’s an undocumented step. You have to fill out these three pieces of information first before you start adding items to your cart. Otherwise, you’ll get errors.”

“No way! We have to tell Janey!” And we did. Janey was thrilled. The other assistants rejoiced. We all broke out in song. [The song is the only fictional part of the whole story.]

Here is why I like moderated usability research. If I had not moderated the research:

I would never have discovered that Janey was composing the order in a marble notebook before logging in.
I would never have known why she was creating a template for each order
I would never have known that she did not know that the search results scrolled on for 20 pages
I would never have known why she kept clicking around before submitting
I would never have known that she didn’t order an item because it was “restricted” and that she decided to go to the store and buy it instead
I would never have been able to help Janey discover how to avoid 3 errors per item.

Any usability testing is better than no usability testing. Users will do to your system things you never thought possible. They will discover difficulties, shortcuts, missing features, bugs, embarrassing typos, and confusing architecture. They will also find delightful aspects. Online or remote, unmoderated testing is better than none at all. You learn a lot from testing—any testing. But if you are moderating the testing, you will discover what else the users are doing before, during, or after using your products. You will get insight into their surroundings and their environments. You will understand why they are interacting the way they are. You may even come to know how they feel about your product. I think that is incredibly valuable information to have.

I practice what I call “Lean Usability Research” which means that, without a lot of time, money and effort, and before the product is fully baked, you go out to users for testing and validation. You don’t need a big budget or a large sample size or a lot of time to get value. You just need to get out there and watch and listen!

*I can feel the criticism of usability researchers…. “You’ve led the user! You’re not supposed to point out what they didn’t notice!” True, I did lead Janey, but wanted to know whether she just didn’t trust extra pages of results, whether she didn’t see the links to extra pages, or didn’t realize that there were ever extra pages. Turns out that she never knew that search results return extra pages and that you have to look for the “page forward” link. This was a couple of years ago.