Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

A New Model

Taking emotion, culture, context, and the rest of the messy complexity of human life into account leads us to a new model for understanding our customers. In Chapter 1, we discussed how companies have been evolving the way they approach the design of their products and services. Organizations often begin with a focus on technology, which later becomes a focus on features, and finally develops into a more holistic focus on experience. At the same time, we are seeing a corresponding evolution in the way organizations think about the people they're trying to serve. At the technology stage, organizations spend little or no time thinking about users explicitly—the act of making something possible is enough. When companies focus on features, they tend to view their customers and users in terms of tasks, goals, and preferences. This makes sense; features map pretty clearly onto these concepts. But a focus on experience starts to show the shortcomings of the task/goal/preference model.

Taking a more holistic, experience-focused approach to design means taking a more holistic view of people. What we need are frameworks and terminology that are closer to the ways people talk about and live their lives. To understand people as people, our understanding of our customers and users must better match our understandings of ourselves. After all, our customers aren't so different from us when it comes down to their basic motivations and behaviors. Recognizing this is an important step ...