In many endeavors, let alone product development, there’s a gap between knowing what’s best and actually doing it.
Gaining behavioral insights about your potential customers usually falls into one of these gaps. The reason? It can be awkward and exceedingly time-consuming observing and recording the behavior of people you’ve never met as they use or struggle to use your product.
“A conversation with a stranger can be a little, well, strange,” writes Jon Kolko, Vice President of Consumer Design at Blackboard and the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, in his new book.
But founders, even shy ones, should take heart. For one thing, there are ways to overcome the social challenge of ethnographic research. For another, the insights you’ll gain about your customers’ behaviors will drastically supercede anything you’d learn from focus groups or online surveys.
Dispatches From The Front 