User behavior

The way is to disrupt your industry is to attune your ear to what people (i.e., your potential customers) are saying. Countless innovation books underscore the importance of studying context and behavior to unlock untapped market potential. And they’re right. Identifying market norms and untested constraints, situating products and services in the broad landscape of the customer’s day-to-day life, and understanding the triggers, motivations, and influences on people’s behavior all contribute strongly to an organization’s ability to innovate.

Your current customers speak to your core strengths.

Not to say that creating a disruptive product is easy. Even the most innovative companies struggle to identify disruptive innovations more than once or twice. But if you want to completely shake up an industry, the best approach is to develop a deep insight into some group of people--customers or non-customers, buyers or influencers.

 

1. How do users work around potential roadblocks?

Even though we’re looking to create something unconventional, our current customers speak to our core strengths. They’re also typically the most accessible and usually the most friendly. Look to understand this group’s activity and the motivations for their behavior. Pay attention to how your product or service fits into their day-to-day activities. And look for the workarounds they’ve put in place to integrate your product/service into their lives. Addressing the cause of these workarounds might help to unlock a lot of value.
 What is your customer trying to achieve? When you look at your customers’ behavior, you may find opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

 

2. Address all barriers to adoption.

Sometimes, what you see when you observe your customers is how they interact with other people in the course of their activity.

 

3. Identify pain points.

 The challenge for the designer is to find them, even though people tend not to mention them or even notice them. They show up as patterns: repeated comments and observations, often off-hand. The customer simply accepts them as part of the inherent frustration of the activity.
Designing in concert with the behaviors of your customers and the context within which their activities take place leads to opportunities for unconventional thinking and disruptive innovation. But that often requires looking beyond the obvious and staring directly into the blind spots of our accepted norms. By understanding what drives behavior and why, and working with business owners to challenge conventions, interaction designers can continue to have an enormous impact.