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Jan 15, 2021

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How to Listen to Your Customers
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‘Listen to your customers’ is one of the most repeated mantras in product design. It’s also one of the most challenging and misinterpreted parts of product design and marketing. Depending on who you’re talking to, listening to your customers is either the way to go if you want to be successful or something that will ruin your chances of creating something exceptional.

When discussing innovation, people will get caught up in examples of Silicon Valley unicorns and Wall Street high-performers. Names like Apple, Uber, or Airbnb get thrown around a lot. Quotes from Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and Mark Cuban start popping up. They all seem to be living proof of the idea that you shouldn’t be listening to your users. That doing it will get you nowhere exciting.

There is no denying that the inside-out strategies of these companies have led them to create some of the most disruptive products in history. It’s how Google Search, the iPhone, and the Model T were born. No amount of customer research would have resulted in an idea like Facebook or Whatsapp. What’s also true is that this type of thinking has led to plenty of failures. For every iPod success story, there are dozens of failed Amazon Fire Phones.

The flip side is that companies see products created almost to their customers' exact specifications also fail. Why is this? It’s paradoxical that something designed to be liked could end up as a flop. Why do companies that listen to their customers get trapped in Product Death Cycles? The answer still lies in the listen to your customer part. The failure is not a lack of customer input but not asking the right questions and then applying their answers incorrectly.

The Product Death Cycle happens when companies confuse pleasing customers with satisfying their needs. Image credit: David Bland.
The Product Death Cycle happens when companies confuse pleasing customers with satisfying their needs. Image credit: David Bland.

Users are not product designers

The first thing people get wrong about listening to their users is believing they will provide them with breakthrough ideas. This is a big mistake. Listening to your users is about gaining insight into who they are and what they value. It should never be about delegating the task of product design to them. If you don’t already have an idea, don’t expect your users to lead to a great one.

People are bad at explaining what they want and predicting their future behavior. Most are not practiced in the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that innovation requires and have trouble coming up with novel ideas. Your customers are just your customers. They are not designers, engineers, or product managers, and it’s not their job to think like one of them.

In ‘The Lean Product Playbook,’ Dan Olsen explains the difficulties people have when discussing hypothetical benefits:

“The reality is that customers are much better at giving you feedback in the solution space. If you show them a new product or design, they can tell you what they like and don’t like…Having solution space discussions with customers is much more fruitful than trying to explicitly discuss the problem space with them”.

Steve Jobs was right: people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. It’s difficult for them to guess whether they’ll like a hypothetical solution in the future. They can, however, provide helpful feedback when presented with a product that they can experience first-hand.

Pay attention to what users do, not what they say

Listening to your users is also an opportunity to observe them. Remember: people are bad at predicting whether something will be valuable for them or not. They’ll say that they like something and once the idea has been integrated into a product, realize that it’s no use to them anymore.

“Don’t base design decisions on what customers say. You have to watch’s people’s behavior to form valid insights that can drive your product to better experience and higher business success.” — Jakob Nielsen

Observing how people interact with your product will also help you ensure that it’s working as planned and help you refine it. It can reveal new problems and pain points you hadn’t thought about before. Identifying new pain points and then coming up with solutions to them is a much better gamble at creating successful products than entrusting product design to a group of people that know nothing about it. Intuit, Twitter, and Yelp have all pivoted into better products after making adjustments based on observations of user behavior.

Pinterest is another example of a company that found success by closely examining how users were interacting with their product. In its first iteration, Pinterest was a mobile app named Tote that allowed people to shop multiple websites from a single platform. It had a unique feature for creating, saving, and sharing lists of products from vendors on the app. A year into its launch, Tote had plenty of users, but few were making purchases. While trying to figure out the problem, the app’s creators observed that people were using the “favorites’’ feature to compile collections of items and then share them with friends. They recognized an opportunity in this and flipped Tote into Pinterest: a platform for creating and sharing collections that now has over 440 million active users.

Had Pinterest’s founders gone up to users and asked them what they wanted, they would have probably gotten caught in a product death cycle. People would’ve asked for things like more vendors, coupons, or shipping discounts. This would have done little to improve their sales because that wasn’t why they were low. People weren’t using Tote for purchases because, at the time, that was a very difficult thing to do on mobile devices. Technology for mobile payments was still in its infancy. The founders would’ve gotten stuck trying to make Tote work when the technology available couldn’t support their product.

Listening to your customers does not mean giving up your creative vision

Another common misconception is that listening to customers means giving up creative vision. Brands centered on being “creative” or “disruptive” are especially wary of integrating customer input into their production process. To them, it means exchanging innovation for lukewarm results that are just right.

This goes back to seeing customer research as delegating product development to customers. The purpose of talking to your customers is not to ask them what to do but to better understand what’s valuable to them. You talk to your customers so that you can better inform your problem space, understand who you are working for, and make sure that you don’t lose touch with their needs.

Innovation alone doesn’t guarantee success. If people do not understand the value you are offering and you do not understand how to bring that value to them, your ideas will likely wind up as flops. This is why design thinking approaches emphasizing listening to users have proven to be a lifeline for innovative companies. They help them ensure that their ideas will gain enough traction to succeed.

Airbnb was saved from the brink of failure when it started listening to its users. A year into its launch, the company’s team had problems getting people to book rooms on their platform. Revenue was almost nonexistent, and they were close to going bust. In a bid to figure out what was going on, the team decided to go into their hosts’ homes.

It turned out that their great idea was being held back by the silliest of things: hosts were posting low-quality images of rooms and customers weren’t confident in booking them because they looked sketchy. Airbnb’s hosts weren’t professional hoteliers, photographers, or marketers. They didn’t understand the importance of good-looking, well-lit images for attracting guests. Once the team posted better images on their platform, revenue improved immediately. Talking to users saved their innovative idea from failing because of bad photos.

A better way to listen to your customers

1. Understand your users’ limitations
  • People are great at telling you where they want to go but not how to get there. Do not rely on them for ideas.

  • Talk to them in the solution space and use the data you gather to inform your problem space.

2. Ask better questions and observe more
  • Don’t look for product ideas; look for pain points.

  • Ask your customers what they would like to do, not what they want. Inquire about the difficulties they experience when performing a task or achieving a result.

  • Observe them using your product or doing similar tasks to identify pain points and potential opportunities.

3. Apply your findings selectively
  • You don’t have to apply all the feedback you received—not every pain point is worth addressing.

  • Use what you learned to inform your problem space and make changes only after analyzing whether they will truly improve your product.

  • Don’t stifle your team’s creative direction by using customer feedback to set rigid parameters.

Listening to your users is the best way to create value for them

Listening to your customers does not mean allowing them to control your creative vision. It means using their input to inform your ideas and set a bar for your creative process. Ultimately, it’s about ensuring whether people want your ideas and if those ideas will be feasible from a business standpoint.

Design isn’t just creating beautiful things — it’s also about creating value. And the best way to bring value to your customers is by understanding them. Never lose sight of your users and what you are creating for them. If you are not thinking about them, who are you designing for?

Want to build better user-centered products? Torii Studio can help! Contact us and tell us about your idea.


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