What Users and Buyers Really Want

The May 28^th issue of the New Yorker included a “Financial Page” article by James Surowieki, called “Feature Presentation” which I found interesting. In the article, Mr. Surowieki describes the “peculiar problem” companies experience when attempting to meet the demands of buyers, who want every possible bell and whistle included in technology products, and the demands of users who want simple, intuitive products that meet their needs. He notes that users have poor skills at evaluating their skills and so purchase products too complicated for their use. Mr. Surowieki contends that since feature creep is the result of giving the user as buyer what he asked for, there is no easy solution.

I counter that there is an easy solution. While I am a tremendous user advocate, I am not a fan of building necessarily what the user explicitly asks for. Rather, I’m a fan of building what the user and the buyer actually want. To build a product people actually want requires us – the designers, the developers and the product managers – to see a much bigger picture than just the product’s feature set. To build a product people actually want requires us to:

• Deeply understand and empathize with the user’s and the buyer’s skills, goals, hidden desires, biases and environment
• Be aware of our product’s roadmap and our company’s plans for the future
• Be cognizant of our product’s special niche in the market

And to use this knowledge in our product planning, product development and product marketing.

Mr. Surowieki writes “In theory, the best strategy is to make complex features simple, packaging all the power and the options people think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use.” In fact, he and I would agree if I could just rephrase that sentence a bit to “The best strategy is to implement features that are appropriately complex to meet the skills of the user they target, packaging all the power and options people actually want into a design that they’ll find appropriate for their use.”

I think I’ll write to Mr. Surowieki about personas.