[ Part II ]

Exposing Secrets

If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’ve learned a lot about the six types of mental processes I’d like you to focus on. As a reminder, here are the things you should think about with regard to your target customers:

Vision/Attention

What is attracting your customers’ attention? What are the words, images, and objects they are looking for?

Wayfinding

How are customers representing where they are (whether in the physical world, an app, or virtual space)? How do they believe they can interact with and navigate in this space?

Memory

What are the past experiences customers are using to frame and understand what they are experiencing? What are mental models/stereotypes that are forming their expectations about how things should work and what happens next?

Language

What are the words your customers are using? What do those words, and their associated meanings according to the customers, say about their level of expertise (thereby suggesting how they might want to be engaged by you)?

Decision Making

What is the problem your customers think they need to solve? How does that differ from the actual problem? How do they think they can get to the solution? What subproblems do they need solve and what decisions do they need to make along the way?

Emotion

What are your customers’ deep-seated goals, desires, and fears? How are those affecting their decisions, and what they are looking to achieve? How might that affect what will appeal to them?

You may be asking: as a product manager or product or service designer without formal training in the psychological sciences, how can I learn about all of these cognitive processes? Will we have the time or budget to understand all these things? Do I really need to know all this to design my product/service?

The answers, I believe, are all positive. Nonpsychologists can learn about these individual cognitive processes through a combination of watching your customers in action (I call it contextual inquiry) and interviewing them.

Further, I would argue that you can get all the information you need through qualitative research and watching people work without fancy equipment, huge budgets, or lengthy studies. I am talking about weeks, and not months (or, for our large enterprise and government colleagues, not years!)

The number one reason projects go over budget and take longer than planned is due to changes made in the late stages of production or right after launch because the features needed are different than those that were built. An intimate understanding of your customers will dramatically reduce the chance that your product misses the mark and requires timely and costly refactoring.

This part of the book lays out how you and your team, whether trained in research or not, can extract the information you need for product and service design by watching your audience and interviewing them. I’ve met great designers that do much of this instinctively, but it took them years to hone their skills. Why not go from good to great faster and without so much trial and error? Let’s get started!