[Sigia-l] making the case for field research for innovation

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 01:52 PM 12/13/2002 -0500, Listera wrote:
>Field research may lead to innovation or invention (not necessarily
>interchangeable, BTW) or may actually hinder it. The latter by pandering to
>what customers might think they need/want today, as opposed what they might
>need/want in the future. Sometimes you have to follow customers, sometimes
>you have to lead them. It depends.

But if you don't know them, you can do neither.

The sales force is engaged in one kind of field research, but may have 
absolutely no idea how the product is actually used.

The sales force at a financial services company told me that the typical 
user of their payroll application used general office software and was 
generally familiar with Windows interfaces, using email and a variety of 
applications.

As part of our user research, we sat in on training classes, and 
interviewed attendees. Here's what we found. They used very few 
applications. Most of them were proprietary for their industry. Few had 
email at work. And they did not use Office(tm) software.

So everything about how they were designing their user interface was based 
on a seriously mistaken assumption.

Interestingly,  we also worked with the Training, Tech Support and 
Documentation departments for this product to come up with a list of the 
aspects of the current program that were the most difficult for users (and 
were costing the company money in customer care of various sorts). Their 
lists were (a) almost identical and (b) very close to the ones we came up 
from in doing field research.

Sometimes both user research and usability evaluation are a way things 
visible and starting a conversation that's just waiting to happen.

Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

Upcoming Presentations:
Using Personas in the Development Process
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UPA 2003 - June 23-27, Scottdale, AZ
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http://www.upassoc.org/conf2003/

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