people criticize user-centered design by saying that talking with users will not lead you to come up with new, breakthrough solutions. Those critics like to quote Henry Ford, who famously said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” They also like to point out the example of Steve Jobs and how Apple has launched many successful products using what seems to be a very “inside-out” product development process. In fact, Steve Jobs cited the same Henry Ford quote in a 2008 interview with Forbes.
It is true that customers are not likely to identify the next breakthrough solution in your product category. But why would anyone expect them to? They are not product designers, product managers, or technologists. The fallacious thinking comes in when people use this argument to rationalize why it's not important to talk with customers or to understand their needs and preferences. Most people who make that argument are really using it as an excuse to not talk with customers because they want to adopt an “inside-out” philosophy. They think that they have all the answers and that talking with customers is a waste of time. They don't understand problem space versus solution space.
It's likely true that customers won't invent a breakthrough product for you; but that doesn't mean it's a waste of time to understand their needs and preferences. On the contrary, a good understanding of customer needs and preferences helps product teams explore new potential solutions and estimate how valuable customers are likely to find each one to be.
Critics of user-centered design like to justify their views by saying, “Apple doesn't talk to customers.” At Apple's 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs shared a more enlightened perspective that is consistent with the Lean Product Process when he said:
You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it… As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with: What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? …Not starting with: Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we're going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take.
A Tale of Two Apple Features
Even though Apple does indeed have a reputation for not soliciting customer feedback on products before they're launched, a large part of why their products are so successful is because, despite that, they have an in-depth understanding of customer needs. Consider the Touch ID fingerprint sensor that Apple introduced with the iPhone 5S. Touch ID utilizes advanced technology: the high-resolution sensor is only 170 microns thick and captures 500 dots per inch. The button is made of sapphire crystal – one of the clearest, hardest materials available – to protect the sensor. The button also acts as a lens to precisely focus the sensor on the user's finger. Touch ID maps out individual details in the ridges of fingerprints that are smaller than the human eye can see and can recognize multiple fingerprints in any orientation.
It's unlikely that any iPhone customer would have come up with such a solution. I would guess that Apple didn't test the solution with many customers before launching it. Despite that, I argue that the iPhone team had a good understanding of the problem space and could be confident that customers would consider Touch ID valuable. Touch ID offered a new alternative to the traditional way of unlocking your iPhone and logging in to the App Store to make a purchase. Touch ID is better because what matters to customers when they're authenticating is how convenient and how secure it is. Usually, there is a tension between those two customer benefits, with more convenient authentication mechanisms being less secure (and vice versa).
Most iPhone users will tell you that they unlock their phones quite frequently, often multiple times per day. Because people value their time, reducing the time it takes to unlock is a clear benefit. iPhone users value security, too. They don't want unauthorized people to be able to access their phone, especially if it is lost or stolen. With a four-digit passcode, the odds of someone guessing your passcode are 1 in 10,000. According to Apple, the odds that two fingerprints are similar enough for Touch ID to consider them the same is 1 in 50,000 (and it's much harder to try different fingers than it is to type in different numbers).
Touch ID makes authenticating much quicker than having to enter an unlock passcode or App Store password. It's also more convenient because users no longer have to worry about forgetting these passcodes.
Because Touch ID clearly saves time, is more convenient, and is more secure than the previous solution, the iPhone team could be confident that customers would consider the feature valuable, even without explicitly validating it with them. However, if Apple didn't test Touch ID with customers, it still ran the risk of some unforeseen negative consequence. It's worth pointing out that Apple does test their products internally with their employees (who are often a good proxy for customers). This internal testing tactic where you use your own product is called “dogfooding.”
That being said, Apple isn't perfect. For example, customers were not happy with a product “improvement” that Apple made with the power button on the 2013 MacBook Pro. In the prior version of the laptop, the power button was located away from the keyboard keys, was smaller, had a different color, and was inset, all of which made it difficult to press by accident. When users pressed the button in the prior version, a dialog window would appear, providing options to restart, sleep, or shut down their laptop, along with the option to cancel any action. But Apple decided to change the power button design for the 2013 version: they made it look like the other keys and incorporated it into the keyboard (in the upper right, where the eject key used to be). The new power button was placed right next to the “delete” key as well as the key that increases the sound volume, both of which are used frequently. As a result, users started accidentally pressing the power button (and then had to click the cancel button).
To add insult to injury, Apple's subsequent operating system update – OS X Mavericks – changed the behavior of the power button. When the power button is pressed in Mavericks, you no longer get the dialog window with its various choices; instead your computer goes right to sleep. The combined effect of those two changes (moving the power button and changing its behavior) resulted in frustrated users whose laptops would suddenly go to sleep unexpectedly. Usability issues such as this are easy to identify through customer testing – even with a small number of testers.
Let's compare these two Apple examples. In the case of the Touch ID, there were clear benefits and no unforeseen risks arose. In the case of the power button changes, what were the intended customer benefits? It's unclear what they were. Perhaps the new power button design addressed internal company objectives related to aesthetics or reduced cost. Regardless, the button's new design and behavior resulted in dissatisfaction for customers. It's true that customers aren't going to lead you to the Promised Land of a breakthrough innovative product, but customer feedback is like a flashlight in the night: it keeps you from falling off a cliff as you try to find your way there.
Using the Solution Space to Discover the Problem Space
Customers are also not likely to serve you their problem space needs on a silver platter. It's hard for them to talk about abstract benefits and the relative importance of each – and when they do, it's often fraught with inaccuracies. It's therefore the product team's job to unearth these needs and define the problem space. One way is to interview customers and observe them using existing products. Such techniques are called “contextual inquiry” or “customer discovery.” You can observe what pain points they run into even if they don't explicitly mention them to you. You can ask them what they like and don't like about the current solutions. As you form hypotheses about the customer needs and their relative importance, you can validate and improve your hypotheses using these techniques.
The reality is that customers are much better at giving you feedback in the solution space. If you show them a new product or design, they can tell you what they like and don't like. They can compare it to
