Sneaking into people’s lives and admitting it

Once upon a time there was a mobile company who wanted to improve people’s lives (and their bottom line) by offering some amazing relevant and useful services. In order to do that, they decided to do some extensive research to ask customers what kind of information and services they’d like to have on their mobiles.
The customers were happy to be consulted. They filled questionairs and came into the discussion room to talk about their problems and what they needed to make things better. They got excited with the prospect o having updated train times, shopping lists, and news handy so they could organize their hectic urban lives on the go.

The well-intentioned mobile company took that on board and prioritized their product development with renewed confidence. A few months later, they launched their wap portal with lots of useful services.

The design and product teams watched traffic stats anxiously, looking to validate their hard work. But the stats were just weird. People were not accessing train times and news as expected. Instead, they were going crazy for things like nude, awful quality animated gifs (this was long ago) and clunky apps like mobile chat, which defied usability and common sense at the time. And yet, the revenue was coming from those.

What’s the moral of the story?
Customer/design research cannot make all the hard decisions for you or eliminate risk totally.  Innovation should be user-centric, but for it to happen there has to be some experimentation and the will to go out of your comfort zone with some calculated risk.

Often the best test ground for innovation is life and not the research lab. Traditional quantitative and lab qualitative research is useful, but for innovation purposes it might mean testing within what we already know or suspect, and having interesting insights filtered out through what users pre-judge as being important. I’m more convinced by the minute that observational and contextual research techniques like ethnography, where you observe people in action, in context and their environment, has the potential to surprise and shows us opportunities which would not be otherwise be articulated in a lab.

But we should pick these insights to inspire and differentiate, and not just to cover ourselves. A bit of courage often pays off.