Avoiding Camels

We’ve been talking a lot about marketing, market research market intelligence. One major component for performing this research is focus groups; or more broadly, gaining insight into your target market. However, relying on your market to define your product can be very dangerous. How do you avoid letting your market research turn your offering into a camel?

This is genuinely an open question. It’s very difficult to avoid. I’ve been involved in some massive camels.

The Simpsons captured this phenomenon perfectly. In the episode “The Homer”, Homer is tasked with designing the perfect car because, after all, he represents the middle of the target market. The result is an utter disaster.

There is a huge challenge in asking your market what they want (in my opinion), because most of the feedback is solution oriented instead of problem oriented. Ideo (http://www.ideo.com/us/), the design firm behind many creative products and including just about everything that Apple produces, has perfected this process.

I can’t completely break down their design process, but there’s one key takeaway I’ve learned- look at the extremes of your target market. It seems logical to find people right at the heart of your target market and focus on pleasing them. Then, expand from there. Ultimately, this is probably what you’ll end up doing, but look to the people that are on the fringes, the early adopters, experts, late adopters, etc. After trying this in a very limited way at work, I’m starting to see the genius of it.

At work, I produce data analysis reports, charts, tables and generally anything you can do in Excel. The life of a rock star isn’t what everyone expects, what can I say? In this work, I get random people all over my organization asking for my services. But, I almost always get a solution dictated to me. And this, ladies and gents, produces camels that are basically useful to no one.

There are guidelines for developing these sorts of things, this is an example of ignoring all of them. (To be fair, you are looking at gibberish data and I clipped off some important parts for security reasons). The point is, this chart is a serious camel. It has probably been redesigned a dozen times, with a ton of user feedback. Market research is not the issue here; this is exactly what they’ve asked for. And yet, it’s nowhere close to what they want.

Since then, I’ve started focusing on the extremes. Specifically, two user types: the experts who know the underlying data and novice users who don’t necessarily even know what the chart is measuring. By focusing on these 2 groups, some very good things started happening.

One, the development time dropped dramatically. This is likely due to needing feedback from fewer people. But also, it’s easier to get deeper feedback from this reduced size of the feedback group.

Two, the users providing feedback were much better about describing the problem rather than the solution. As a result, I think it’s the middle that suffers from the “solution” thinking the most. In retrospect, that makes sense. The experts know exactly what they’re looking for, what’s possible, and can directly describe the problem (in many cases they are incredibly knowledgeable about the problem itself). And, the novices don’t understand the solution at all, they only know the problem. Pay dirt.

It’s those pesky “middle” users that know enough to be dangerous. But, it seems, please the extremes and you can drag the middle along for free.

This is the result of working with the extremes. Just aesthetically, this chart is much easier to read and understand (again, a lot of clipping and gibberish data undermine my point here). And, it addresses the major use cases much more effectively.