I listen to a few different screenwriting podcasts and one of the most fascinating parts is the studio note process. Writers submit scripts and then studio execs make notes in the margin and hand it back. In TV this happens in a very compressed time, but with movies this can go on for years.
Studio execs are constantly trying to make characters more likeable or artificially raise the stakes of the scene. Some characters should do unlikeable things at times, then it's even more rewarding when they redeem themselves at the end. Or you want a really memorable villain. Some stories just have fairly low stakes.
Some of the most successful writers talk about reading "the note behind the note". They take the criticism, but don't make the exact adjustment the exec is looking for. They take it as an indicator the character isn't developed enough yet or the story isn't engrossing enough. If the exec were absorbed by the writing more their mind wouldn't wander enough to add a note.
I think that's a good attitude to have when producing anything of great complexity. The fact a customer has a comment doesn't mean you should just implement what they asked for, it means you should really look to understand what they value in the current product and enhance that.
> The fact a customer has a comment doesn't mean you should just implement what they asked for, it means you should really look to understand what they value in the current product and enhance that.
I often felt this way with public education, even down to the elementary-school level. When I was in school, specifically high school, I felt appalled that my voice didn't matter. It was always some school board member telling me that they knew best for me. And certainly that is true to some extent; there are some insights adults will have that students just haven't been exposed to yet due to limited life experience. But they didn't even bother to ask us how they could improve school.
An elementary school kid can still provide great value. Ask them what they would change, and they may reply, "less homework". You know less/no homework isn't the best solution, but maybe what they're really asking for isn't what you hear on the surface. A plea for less homework could be a plea to make education more exciting, without necessarily changing the dial on homework. Is there a way to keep the same amount of homework, but make it more engaging or meaningful that it feels like less work? I think at times we need to dig deeper on people's feedback, past the surface.
I like your approach but in this example, kids really should have less homework. It galls me that a 10 year old is expected to spend 8 hours confined to a school building, and then spend a signficant chunk of after-hours on homework. Unless this is supposed to be preparation for an adulthood where you're never truly off the clock.
This is a really great comment that aligns with most of my experience. Asking feedback is step 1, where you get information and setup social dialogue and reciprocation. Step 2 is to find why you get that feedback, distilling underlaying motivations or reasons why. Sometimes it's not there, and customers really do want a faster horse. But often times, customers want better horses in ways they can't imgine. They just feed you back the limitations of horses.
Step 3 is to verify your true understanding of the feedback using prototypes. "This metal horse is just as fast, but can handle 10 times the forces on the field. Can you try and check if this is what you meant with a faster horse?"
That's a great little anecdote, and crazy insight into the creative process, especially how it merges with corporate needs.
We love to hate Studio Execs - but think how hard their job is ... they have to justify a $300M budget and make sure it hits specific audiences. Can't be easy.
Then again, most big budget films are actually crap, and it's all in CGI anyhow ... so ...
Maybe a better study would be the likelihood that the execs notes actually create better returns :)
In all the cases here, what the customer wanted was available in some other car. Thunderbird owners said they wanted 4 doors. But there were several 4-door fast cars on the market which they didn't buy, so you shouldn't believe them.
A common situation in startups is, there are two current products on the market A and B. A has 99% of the market, B has 1%. The amount of feature X (speed, ease of use, scalability, ...) they provide is limited:
---A----B--------------------------------------> X
A startup is proposing to make product C. It will be awesome because it provides way more X:
---A----B---------------------------------C----> X
But you need to ask, if people really value X, why aren't they already switching from A to B?
It happens all the time that startups ask customers, "Do you want a product with more X?" and they say yes. But if they're not already using the product out there with the most X, you shouldn't believe them.
Or more X comes at the cost of A and B. Car companies have a terrible habit of making options packs where you have to choose between stupid arbitrary things such as:
- Auto-dimming rear view mirror
- Compass
- Blind Spot Information System
OR
- Heated seats
- Heated Wing Mirrors
- Decent sound system
There is no reason you shouldn't be able to have all of these things together on your vehicle, but they say "Hey, you can have one option pack or the other, no compromises!"
Would I want a vehicle with more X? Absolutely I would. I would have one in a heartbeat if it also came with A and B but it does not. And given the asinine requirement I must choose, I will take A and B over X... even though I really want X.
If a vehicle came with A, B and X, I will take it over any vehicle that is missing one of those features.
Thought I'm the only one with this problem. Leather and leatherette are disadvantages to me - wish I could go with a premium cloth option and not have to sacrifice a more powerful engine, CarPlay, etc.
I once had a Peugeot with "sport leather seats", or something - it was a rather nice coarse woven cloth in some synthetic material in the centre, and nice leather everywhere else. Awesome.
In my current car, I really wanted the adaptive cruise control, but opted out because of the mandatory leather seats in that trim.
FWIW, look at VW and Subaru. Both often offer their mid-tier packages with cloth, but most amenities. My Golf Sportwagen 4Motion S is cloth, no sunroof, but with heated seats and basic driver assistance/collision avoidance.
Maybe it’s just because I live in Texas so it’s always hot, but I don’t mind the leather seats. One advantage I think they have over cloth is the fact that they do hold their temperature better. Pair that will cooled seats and you have a nice match. Sure, it’s hot for a minute, but more comfortable in the long run.
That said, you should have the choice of what you want.
Many many years ago, I was shopping for a new car. I found one model where I could get a manual transmission, but it didn't include a tachometer. To get a tachometer you needed to upgrade to a package with the automatic transmission. The stupidity of that choice turned me off on that brand for about 2 decades.
There is no reason you shouldn't be able to have all of these things together on your vehicle
Really? Because I thought of three just while reading your comment, and I don't even work in manufacturing. Reduced SKUs, ease of manufacturing scheduling, and some package options might exclude the options of other packages (you can't get heated seats and cloth seat coverings as one example). I'd even argue that they could be good reasons, as creating the packages you'd like add expense and it has been (hypothetically) found that customers won't pay the extra.
OTOH, though I don't spend a lot of time perusing automotive options packages, of the ones I've looked it appears that the packages are additive. You can have package A, with X, Y and Z. You can have package B, which has X, Y, Z, and the addition of W and X for an additional $900.
This is its own problem. I want one feature of package B but package B costs +$$$. I don't care about the other features package B also comes with (in other words, provide $0 of value to me), and the feature I want isn't worth $$$.
As a result, I don't buy package B, or even don't buy the car at all and go to another comparable model.
I had no opportunity to explain why I didn't buy package B to the manufacturer, so do they even realize they're missing out because of that? I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I want one feature of package B but package B costs +$$$. I don't care about the other features package B also comes with (in other words, provide $0 of value to me), and the feature I want isn't worth $$$.
It's been ages since we've purchased a new car, but can't you just check the box for "$FOOBAR" after checking the box for Package A? Our Leaf was pretty much pre-built with few choices outside of packages, but we did that with our Scion. Additionally, though my BMW motorcycle came with a "package", I could still get stuff a la carte. I'd just have to wait for BMW to build it and ship it, instead of riding it home that day. (Or in my case, the dealer has the a la carte items on the shelf. They sent me home with the taller windshield in a box, for example, and I bolted it on myself.)
OTOH, I'm using a motorcycle, an early-adopter electric car, and a quirky little off-brand Toyota as examples. Probably not the best examples for sussing the average car buying experience.
Sometimes. There's lots of variations though, some companies only offer specific trim levels, others appear to offer individual options but then you'll run into "That option is only available options x, y, and z, and is not compatible with w. Include x, y, z and remove w?".
Ah, okay, thanks for the insight; as I said, it's been a while since I've dealt with this. I shouldn't be surprised now that I think of it. Want $HOT_ITEM (say, CarPlay)? It's included in our $2000 luxury package! Except I just want the CarPlay, which can't cost two grand. sigh, fine, sell me crap I don't need so I can get the crap I want. Sounds kinda like a bill going through Congress. :-)
It's exactly like a bill going through Congress. Except usually with the bill going through Congress, the items you don't want are quite a lot more toxic.
To further support this claim, I bought my car specifically because it offered heated cloth seats.
Car manufacturers are idiots. I want a small car because I live in a city, but I will never buy a small car with a sunroof, because I am tall and that space comes out of the inside of the car. So many features are bundled with sunroofs it is absurd. I would have probably spent 5 grand more on my car if I could have gotten features without getting a sunroof.
They literally could have charged me the price of a car with a sunroof and given me one without a sunroof and I would have been pretty happy.
It was true ten or twelve years ago, and don’t think car dealers were lying. I think what’s changed is the switch from resistive wires to carbon panels. Heated wire with cloth seats would probably leave griddle marks on your ass. :-P
Even more dated, IIRC my first car, an 83 model, had heated cloth seats. I am sure a 93 model I had did have heated cloth seats, and it is a bit more than 10 years since 93 ;)
I drive a 2015 Chevy Volt with the non-premium package (i.e. no backup camera, etc.) because the premium-package comes with a shiny white center console which is downright blinding in the sunlight.
The premium package also comes with leather seats which, when it's in the severe negative degrees, you really REALLY don't want.
I just bought a new car. And these lines of reasoning I am reading seem tremendously alien to me. My previous car was 12 years old. I didn't switch from it to something else because my car was fine. I never even looked at what was available during the intervening decade+. Since the day I drove my new car home, I've not looked at a single car (at least not one which I'd ever be able/willing to buy).
People don't sit around just waiting to switch to the model that has more of what they want. They only change their situation every few years or in response to things like collisions or whatnot. And purchasing a car is quite a maniacal process in 2017. Car manufacturers seem to have hired web designers that have profound mental problems and who never attempt to use their own sites. They fight you at every step of the way, making even something simple like finding out what cars the automaker sells a tremendous challenge. And once you do know exactly what you want, it still takes hours and hours of experimentation with the site before you can accurately navigate to find it. I was often reduced to screaming laughter at how stupendously bad the sites were.
And that doesn't even begin to tackle the antiquated dealership system which is just ludicrous at this point. Luckily I didn't need to nickle and dime the dealership and was willing to just walk in and ask them if they were willing to do a grand or so over the TrueCar average price for the car for the region and so I didn't have to fight them. I can't even imagine what the experience is like overall for someone who is looking to save money. I'm single and have no kids. My prior car worked well for over a decade. I was able to approach car buying as 'I want to find something that I like the looks of and is dripping with gadgets and whose payment won't be more than my mortgate'. Even being that open to various possibilities, they still managed to make it an exercise of pain.
I'm certainly not going to considering undergoing that pain again any time soon, even if they do come out with a model that gets 5% better gas mileage or whatever.
> People don't sit around just waiting to switch to the model that has more of what they want.
Sure they do. Tons of people do.
There are tons of people that upgrade their iPhone the day the new one comes out not because their old one suddenly broke that day, but because they want new things.
There's an entire side of the industry - leasing - that specifically caters to people that just want to get a new car every few years.
Lots of people will be looking at the new cars with CarPlay and Android Auto and be seriously considering an upgrade.
Porsche allows you to order a vehicle with any collection of options you like. But you'll pay for it and have to wait while they build it.
Most consumers don't have strong preferences in vehicles and will sacrifice a lot in order to get a good deal on something they can drive off the lot today.
Correction: Something they perceive as being a good deal.
Virtually nobody goes to a car dealership and leaves with the vehicle they want at the price they wanted to pay and a large percentage of people are probably confused about what exactly they end up with and how much they ended up paying for it.
> Virtually nobody goes to a car dealership and leaves with the vehicle they want at the price they wanted to pay and a large percentage of people are probably confused about what exactly they end up with and how much they ended up paying for it.
I did! I was buying a very slightly used 2015 model, the 2016 models had just gone deep discount (9k off sticker price), I was able to use that to drop another 2k off the price of my 2015.
Good car buying experiences do happen, admittedly not that often. Having correct timing (knowing when models go on clearance) and being willing to comparison shop across all dealers around the state (and neighboring states) is key to getting a good deal.
I did as well. I specifically found an ex-demo vehicle, so it only was 3 months old but it knocked off 20% off the original price. Effectively, the dealership took the initial depreciation hit, not me.
Just bought a car and wish I was better prepared, but that's on me. They get you in so many ways. I think I won 2 rounds out of 5, so I don't feel too bad. Love my car though (VW GTI).
I thought all cars were like this? When I bought my car (a Mercedes) I told them the options I wanted, paid for it, waited two months while they built it, and they gave it to me.
I could have bought showroom cars (or pre-built cars) at a discount, but none had the options I wanted.
When I bought a new car I did this. The salesman warned me that the weird combination of options I wanted was not popular. I bought it anyway.
When it came time to sell the car, the salesman was right :-) When you buy an unpopular mix, you pay twice - once for the options, and again when you have to sell the car at a discount because of those options.
The cars on the lot tend to be the most popular option combinations, meaning the most sellable cars at the most profit. The dealers aren't fools.
Over here, we don't have packages at all, as far as I know. You can either get one of the cars the dealership built for you, or you can make your own, but the pre-built cars aren't based on any package, they're just what that specific dealership picked.
Porsche's difference is that they don't lock things down to options packages (bundles, i.e. Mercedes' Premium Package I/II/III). If you want the digital instrument cluster on your new E-class, you get the fragrance system along with it in Premium Package II even if you're ordering a custom build. The limitations are really noticeable when you start looking at wheel options with most manufacturers.
Porsche just throws a massive options sheet at you and lets you go to town. You get the exact car you want on a granular level. On the other hand, that's also a disadvantage. If you have deviated stitching everywhere else and tick off the "Steering Column Casing in Leather" option instead of "Steering Column Casing in Leather with Stitching in Deviated Thread" the steering column, Porsche will accept the order but won't substitute the stitching for you. You get exactly what you order, good or bad. And there have been some pretty ugly combinations ordered in the past. Want a Miami Blue exterior, matching wheels in the same, a bright red leather with acid green stitching, wood trim, a carbon fiber shifter, etc.? You can order it. You really, really shouldn't. But you can. You'll also pay for it. The average customer will order something like $10-15k in options, and more Porsche buyers special order compared to other brands. Porsche dealers tend to have less inventory on hand as a result as well.
I did this. Paid $1000 at order time. waited 3 months (taking bus while waiting). car came in on a Sunday. went to get it on Monday. the dealer had sold it to someone else. no recourse.
Did you not sign a purchase contract when you paid your deposit? I know I did when I ordered my car - it stipulated that the car will be ready for collection up to 30 days after delivery to dealership, and the dealership can't sell it in that time.
of course they refunded the $1k. They didn't pay for the 3 months of going without a car in West Los Angeles nor the 3 more months of having to wait if I ordered again.
I really wish the laws were such that I could more easily get the car directly from the factory like Tesla, no middleman. I know with BMW you can actually order a car, pick it up in Germany at the factory , drive it around Europe and they'll then ship it to the USA for you. No idea how much extra it would cost and not sure I want to drive in Europe vs taking public transit but at least I'd get my car
I thought the "European delivery" scheme's attraction was that it is cheaper than buying the same car in the US - because you are driving it around Europe, it's imported as an used car.
I did exactly that. It actually costs about 5% less. And driving the German Autobahn or some twisty mountain roads in The Swiss Alps is an unique experience.
Some other premium brands will also do custom orders, at least for certain vehicles in certain places. But most mainstream brands only want to sell what's on the lot today. Try placing a custom order for a Honda CR-V in a USA dealership and they'll probably laugh at you.
Having been unlucky enough (twice) to have experienced sidewall tire damage, the one deal breaker for me on a new car is the absence of a spare tire and/or a well in the trunk and the option to buy one.
Every year, the number of automobiles that have a spare tire or the option to even have one in the car shrinks. I'm assuming this de-contenting has to do with making the car lighter to improve fuel economy?
In my mind, a "tire inflation kit" (aka an aerosol can) or expensive-to-replace run-flats have limited benefits in general and absolutely zero benefits when it comes to sidewall damage. I would not want to be in the middle of nowhere with the wrong kind of flat in a car without a spare.
Additionally, the spare tire well can make a noticeable difference in the undercarriage drag. I know a number of people have removed the spare tire well on their Imprezas and improved their mileage by more than the amount they got when they had just taken out the spare itself.
Of course the spare tire well has some weight to it, but pictures I've seen of the delete do make the car appear more aerodynamic from beneath.
The full size spare in my current car has been transferred from my two previous cars, I swapped it for space saver spares that came with the newer cars.
I'm kinda surprised that the diameter of the full-sized spare tire matches the diameter of the tires on all three cars. It would seem unlikely given the variability of rim sizes and tire aspect ratios across cars over time.
Most people mean spare tyre already attached to a wheel and probably inflated when they say spare tyre - eg it's ready to go. There seems more chance that the wheel can be swapped between vehicles.
As much as I hate it, with manufacturing you can kinda understand it, because economies come from scale, and it's probably not feasible (or too time consuming) for car manufacturers to serve you every single out of the 2^N combinations of N features that you might want.
That's why you get trims, and then packages within those trims.
It works fine if you manufacture after a sale. Just look at millions of computer options. But, the current car model is to make a car then find a buyer which means you really want a small number of popular models.
Tesla is the largest exception, but even they limit options.
But they rarely ever offer a vehicle with all the options. It's either base model, option pack A, option pack B. Rarely do you get the chance to say you know what, just slam all of those in there. Give me top of the line everything... except auto-dimming rear-view mirror, compass and and blind spot information system.
The things that they make you choose between are ridiculous. It's like they put all the features on lottery balls, spin the bucket and pick 6 at random for each package and that's what you get. At least make the feature packages make sense
Usually they do, it's just that that option is quite expensive and you might not care about some (or most) of the features you get in that option. It's particularly bad if you anti-care about some of the options. For instance, if you are opposed to having leather seats, you can't get the highest trim, coz leather seats are a feature there.
For eg. Honda Accord 2018 with all bells and whistles starts at $33.8K while the lowest one starts at $23.5K. There's a good chance that a 40% increase over the base price will put that car out of the budget of a lot of people.
Acura TLX has the option for automatic cruse control, lane followings, and automatic breaking. It has a second option for blind spot detection and several other things. Want both? They have a third option that includes both plus some other stuff but it costs even more.
I mean why blind spot detection as part of the safty package when you can charge 3x as much to include it.
Assembling a computer with 10-15 modular parts (Motherboard, RAM, Graphic Card etc.) is very different from assembling a car when a lot of the features you want need extra hardware and software inside the car.
And as much as I like Tesla, I don't think they are yet at a stage where they can be used as an example of what is possible in the manufacturing world at scale. And they hardly offer any many options. AND, some of their options are just software switches that can be flipped whenever you want the upgrade. That's possible for the model S because it's a very high margin car.
Something like 99% of all the cars purchased new are spec'd by dealers, not by customers. So the problem really wouldn't be solved by allowing you to select some combination of features for a totally unique vehicle. You're just going to walk onto the lot anyway and pick from what's there.
Or order it from the factory with exactly the spec I want... but 99% of people are too impatient to wait for a vehicle to be delivered from the factory and most dealerships don't give them that option because they want what's on the lot gone.
I get it. It's easier to shift vehicles if they all conform to some common spec because then there's nothing that makes worlds different. You pick this spec or that spec, end of story.
But I've played this game too many times with dealers and I just can't be bothered any more, which is why I drive an 8 year old Volvo that is good enough. Would I like a new car? Of course, I'd love a spanking new truck, but the glory of driving off the lot with a brand new vehicle that's not quite exactly what I wanted just isn't worth the loss of the 30% of value as I leave the lot and certainly not the tediousness of talking to car sales people for a day while they fuck around upstairs trying to stress me out.
I'll bring my laptop and use your WiFi to work. I'm quite comfortable helping myself to your endless tea or water from your service department waiting room while I'm in your showroom. No, I'm not giving you the keys to my vehicle which is parked outside your lot on the street so you can't box me in, and here's a photocopy of my driver's license which is plenty adequate for your needs, the original stays in my wallet. Now fuck off and do your job and if you're not back here with the keys, ownership papers and plates to a new car matching the spec I specified by the time I'm finished this user story, you won't find me still sitting here. You wanna play games, play them with someone else.
I've never had a dealer decline to let me order a car. What they won't do is discount it as heavily as something they already have. A lot of folks don't see the cognitive dissonance in wanting to order exactly what they want (that the dealer knows is their perfect car or close to it) but expecting to get those huge discounts they could get on the oddly optioned puke green car that's been on the lot for 75 days.
LOL how else do you think you'd see these puke green shitboxes kicking around our streets? Nobody actually likes those colours do they? There's a reason it's been sitting on the lot 75 days :P
German cars in the US have option packages, you can only choose from what they offer. Sure, if it's not on the lot you can order it or request an allocation or something, but you cannot specify the precise options you want if they're package-only.
Many Subaru options are dealer-installed so the only option you'll have beyond what comes bundled with your trim package is things like roof racks and fog lights that can be installed by a dealership employee.
Are they imported from Europe ? If so I would understand why you can choose only what they offer.
In Europe (for European brands I mean) you don't have such an issue, as long as you are willing to wait a long time to have it delivered, ( I know people that have waited 9-10 months for their VW only because they wanted a specific color) ).
In the US, regardless of where a car was built, you typically have very few options choices. There's not a significant difference in ability to choose on my made-in-Germany Golf and a made-in-Mexico Golf.
I think, over the years, shoppers in the US have shown time and time again that they simply don't care, so these choices have been taken away from those of us who DO care.
Because they have to keep the assembly line moving they make these dumb packages. If they had to hand build each option they couldn't make cars as fast and cheap as they do now. IF they made them modular to accommodate for this on the assembly line, the price would go up. This is why I don't care for or put much effort into specking cars. I get the minimum and work around the lack of features by adding them myself.
Scion did this. They allowed you to choose any option you wanted and add it individually. They didn't really do packages, at least not when I bought one. They also did the pure price thing where you didn't need to shop around at all. And of course the brand died because consumers don't actually seem to want this.
And of course the brand died because consumers don't actually seem to want this.
Eh, the brand probably died for a lot of reasons. I think primarily because Toyota missed the demographic mark. Initially the brand was the less expensive, "hip" brand for the younger crowd (because a Toyota owner's club meeting would look about as gray as a Grateful Dead concert). We saw one before they were available to purchase in the U. S., and placed an order with the local dealer while the Scion-specific showroom was still being built. A few months go by and ours comes in. We, of course, look for other drivers who bought the quirky little box. Ya know what? The other drivers looked a lot like us, with a little gray in their muzzle. Didn't pay much attention to the xAs and xDs (conventional compact cars), but it looked like all Toyota did with the xBs was shift the market from Camrys to xBs.
Cheap car is cheap. Young people and older people can both appreciate that. I still miss the cheap utility of my second gen xB. It wasn’t the best car but it worked well as a little hauler. I still see it around town sometimes, now that I sold it.
Can you say X comes at the cost of Y and Z? A and B in the previous example were products. Y and Z in your example are attributes of the products A, B and C. Pedantic, but less confusing.
While this can be true, it is often the case that the product with more X is not selling because it is poorly executed, or has made too many compromises to deliver more X. In those cases, a product that delivers more X without the drawbacks has a great chance of succeeding.
Right! As the article points out very clearly, it's not the "more X" that stops people buying the new product. It's that to get more X, those cars gave up Y and Z which were really the most important parts even if customer's didn't convey that to the product research guys.
In this case, if the customers do say that more X is a good thing, then having more X probably would lead to more sales for B -- but B is probably deficient in Y and Z. You have to cover the required essentials for the specific product before you can improve on the nice extras.
In the case of a small car, customers would say they'd like it if it was bigger with more headroom and more carry space. If you solve this by increasing the actual physical size of the body, your product will fail. If you solve this by laying out the existing body to give more room, your product will succeed. Although even if you succeed in keeping the same amount of weight and body size and improving headroom, your car will still fail if it now looks ugly because of the changes.
The key is to consider the entire product holistically and focus on all of the user's needs at the same time. Don't just focus on 'more or less X'.
You mean selling a chassis with a a single seat, huge motor, stick shift, and the rest of the "car" being made up of a ginormous sound system wouldn't work? o.O
> But if they're not already using the product out there with the most X, you shouldn't believe them.
Maybe if they're not using it, it's because they value Y, Z, and etc. more, and the product they're using has Y, Z, and etc. The market opportunity can still exist, but the more features you add, the more niche your product is likely to be.
Also, hopefully you have some substantial competitive advantage on X. If you don't, then your competitors might just add X to their product, or a variant thereof, and you're gonna have a bad time.
Switching from A to B isn't going to be free though. Eg changing cloud providers away from AWS to Google's is likely to be quite involved, so unless is that much better, it's simply not worth it for a little improvement.
"Don't Ask Customers What They Want" still gets it wrong. It's not that you shouldn't ask customers what they want. It's that you need to intelligently examine customer feedback and decide
A. If a problem needs fixing at all
B. How to solve that problem or customer desire without doing away with what you got right the first time.
Customers often don't know what is practical to achieve or what the tradeoffs are. It is the job of the business to look at those things and find solutions that will make customers as happy or happier with the product/service.
The flip side is, some companies go out and design products based on their own desires and assumptions, and sometimes get that wrong too. The latest Macbook Pros are a good example. Yeah the product is slim and pretty, but slim and pretty is not a good thing to optimize for at the detriment of powerful and useful. The new Macbook Pros aren't a flop, but one has to think they would've sold a lot more of them if they sacrificed a bit of thinness for significantly more computing power.
> slim and pretty is not a good thing to optimize for at the detriment of powerful and useful
Well... most of the market seems to think that thin and light is the most important thing. It's just that there is a power-user market segment that has different needs that are not as well served by the new models.
[Posting from my 2011 17" MBP, in case you're wondering which side I'm on]
I think the more general market would've bought the new Macbook Pros either way. If they were the same thickness as before with more RAM and a few more standard ports, the casual users would've bought them up and the more professional users would've been happier. Maybe throw in a new color and you're done.
Right, when you ask someone what they want, what they tell you might not be physically possible. We all want a super fast, cheap, small turning radius, small footprint, large interior car.... but some of those requirements are contradictory.
If you ask someone what they wish was different about the choice they made, they will likely wish it had some of the features they had to give up to get the features they wanted more.
Crash safety is the big requirement that's contradictory with those. My daily driver has everything you listed, and good gas mileage too - but it doesn't even have airbags.
In terms of computing power, though, well, the new MBPs are using, generally, the same class of components as the old ones. And Intel doesn’t really make a mobile class above that. They could have increased the battery life by keeping the the same size, but not really made them much faster (except by going for desktop chips, but even very bulky laptops that do that have abysmal battery life).
They could potentially have gone for more RAM with a bigger battery, but they’d still suffer on standby power usage by abandoning LP-DDR; non-LP uses someth8ng like five times more power in standby. They could also have gone for a heftier GPU in the big ones, I suppose, but how many people are buying them for the GPU?
Personally I’m quite glad they slimmed them down a bit; made a 13” an easier replacement for an old Air. Though, I have a 2017 15” in work, replacing a 2013 15”, and I’m less convinced of the benefits of the size reduction there.
Well automakers have more ability to understand their customers; the same applies to a large number of products; as product and even brand focused sites exist that are privately run. Even reddit is likely to have a sub which ties in either directly or indirectly to a product.
I will say that Chevrolet got it right with the second generation Volt. People wanted more EV range, better gasoline efficiency when using the REX, real climate controls with knobs, and such. They got it all and then some. Packaging took a hit as designers wanted a more racy look so back seat head room too a hit but overall it was much improved in usability.
still it is evident watching various models through the years that roominess tends to force models up tier in the size category which in turn leads to a new model filling the original vehicles size niche.
While true, be careful how far you take this. My understanding (I don't know how to verify it) is that McDonalds knew all long that their salads would never sell well enough to pay for the costs of having them. They however rolled them out nationwide, and advertise. The salad itself isn't worth any of this (even though some of their salads are good and with the right dressing healthy), except that in an office there is often "that one person". By having something "that one person" will eat the rest of the office will have go for a team lunch at McDonalds. Thus the salad caused 4 other people to buy a big mac who otherwise would have eaten elsewhere.
When trying to decide what to sell you need to consider these hidden details.
McDonalds is seen as unhealthy fast food relative to other fast foods (subway etc..) To combat this, they introduced a 'healthy' menu that makes people think mcdonalds isn't that unhealthy, they have salads and healthy options after all, so they're more likely to go in the first place.
Once they get there, they'll order what they want, which isn't salad in the first place.
McDonalds introduced their first salads many years before subway became a national chain. Of course current competition is a good reason to keep them, but it clearly can't be cited for the initial decision.
Well, why would you go to McDonalds for healthy food? That's like going to Vegas to work on your meditation practice.
Another example is the MINI Cooper, which has somehow kept growing and now there are models just as large as the SUVs they were making fun of in their early marketing.
One reason why I want McDonalds to have healthy food is because when I am traveling there is a McDonalds at nearly every exit, but the next restaurant with healthy-ish options may be 40 minutes away.
When travelling across continent(Europe in this case) I am always 100% certain that McDonalds will have fresh food and that the staff speaks English. When you're spending 12 hours a day in a car you don't want to get food poisoning from random roadside restaurant or risk spending an hour waiting for your food or not being able to understand the menu. A BigMac is a BigMac everywhere. If they have a health-ish option, I will take that.
That kinda exists with the Hummer, too - the H1 was huge (essentially the AM General version made for consumers), the H2 was scaled down (essentially bodywork on a pickup truck frame), the H3 was even smaller.
Maybe the H4 will be the size of an actual Mini Cooper?
...you are not seeing the MINI SUVs from the buyer perspective. Why would anyone buy one of those monsters? Well, the fit and finish inside is up to BMW standards, the handling has the great MINI handling, the view outside is fantastic with very few blind spots.
In the real world people have dogs and children and childseats and long journeys to see relatives. The MINI SUVs are really good for that as everything fits and the doors open nice and wide.
Now the MINI buyer has looked at all of the other cars on the marketplace and decided on the MINI. The other cars were probably a bit dingy in the back with not quite enough room for both the kids and grandma.
To the actual MINI buyer these practical considerations matter and therefore these are the brand values, not 'size'.
They are hideous cars though.
There are other SUVs that 'jump the shark' to be accepted. The Porsche SUV was the case in point. Now another brand in the VW group - Lamborghini - is making a SUV version of the brand. There is pedigree in that Lamborghini did make tractors and perhaps the first luxury SUV, so they could have made something bomb-proof, for heads of state that was like the G-Wagen but more expensive and could go anywhere with massive wheels and a very large V10 engine. However, they didn't do that, they went for that same luxury fast SUV sector as Porsche, with tyres for the track day not the farm day.
Another VW brand - Bentley - is also moving into the upscale SUV sector. Jaguar are too. Soon every brand will come in SUV flavours so 'MINI' and SUV should be fine. Besides, by the time that the car purchase decision has been made, that detail of 'MINI' being huge has been noted and put aside a long time ago. How the rear seats split and cup-holders, not to mention the Bluetooth connectivity matter far more.
Ugh, yes. That SUV thing is larger in every dimension (except length) than my 328 wagon, but somehow has no passenger room or useful interior space and is ugly as sin.
I will never understand small SUVs. The car you actually want is a wagon. Buy a wagon.
Absolutely. I use the Homer example all the time when helping people with user interviews.
I think it's ok to ask people what they want; it can spark some interesting design notions. But it's important to realize that can have very little to do with what they buy or are happy with. So also ask them why they want it and explore how an expressed desire fits into the context of all their other wants, both spoken and implicit.
At the end of the day, people designing something have to be true authors of that thing. We can't outsource our judgment to anything, survey results very much included. User ideas are sources of interesting design hypotheses, but we're still responsible for testing them vigorously and producing a coherent whole.
Bob Lutz was CEO of Chrysler at the time, and they were market testing different designs for the next Dodge Ram pickup truck (1990's). They went with a design that the majority of people didn't prefer, however those who did prefer it, loved it.
They figured by going after the most loyal and vocal buyers, they'd have the most success.
I always feel like you should just pursue the most passionate 10% of users who are excited about your product, as that enthusiasm is contagious and will eventually persuade everyone else.
I remember when those came out. My mother, who owned a previous generation Dodge Ram hated the look. A decade or so later, she bought a Dodge Dakota with similar styling cues. She didn't hate it enough to turn down the right combination of price and features.
This is probably a good approach to most markets that are relatively commoditized (early '90s GM, Ford and Dodge full-size pickup trucks were roughly interchangeable): find some way to make yours stand out that a fraction of users are really passionate about, then double down on it.
The 2nd gen Ram design aged terribly compare to Ford or GM's mid/late 90s departure from brick-like trucks. You just don't notice how terribly they aged because they fell apart and rusted out faster
That depends a little on your market position. Subaru did the same thing, but that strategy probably won't work as well if you're in the Corolla/Civic part of the market.
Of course the 2.3 is turbocharged, so the displacement figures aren't directly comparable. A closer comparison might be last model year's 3.7L V6 which produced around 300HP.
Bob Lutz is known for bragging about the Viper being designed "from the gut", but Michael Karesh points out that Lutz's most successful projects at Chrysler were based on both intuition-based design and extensive market research.
In the case of the 2004 Cadillac SRX, the designers successfully argued that poor clinic results could be ignored because the general public couldn’t tell what they wanted in the future, that they lacked “reach.” As we now know, the first-generation SRX flopped. When the 2004 Grand Prix tested worse than the old design, the VLE reacted by telling the senior executive board that he wanted to take a baseball bat to the research group. Apparently the board bought this “argument,” as they approved the design despite the clinic results. The market then vindicated the clinic.
Lutz put an end to these practices. Designers’ passions and creativity are essential to creating beautiful cars, and Lutz did what he could to free them. But he also required that every design win its clinic by “a substantial margin” to get approved. Designs with merely decent (or worse) scores were revised, even if this or that gut suggested that the clinic results were wrong, and even if this made the project late and over budget. As is often the case, there isn’t a correct choice between “right brain” guts and “left brain” clinic scores. Successful cars follow from the proper combination of the two.
There is a useful distinction that I've commonly seen in writing/editing. It is that people are good at identifying what they don’t like, but are terrible at telling you why or what to do about it. I’ve used this distinction to help tease out feedback from ideation. If you’re in a UX or designer role, you’re a professional creative… Random Joe or Jane on the street, not steeped in technical knowledge, probably have terrible ideas for improving a product, but are intimately familiar with their own frustrations.
The real key is that automakers have failed to think creatively when it came to answering customer complaints in implementation. Take the one at the end of the article:
"'I wish it was smaller and easier to park,' is probably a common complaint among owners of full-size SUVs. Making an Escalade or Expedition smaller to “please” such a customer would be foolish. But don’t bet against it happening!"
Rather than making it physically smaller, automakers could take the approach of using technology to make it feel smaller. That's what Infiniti did with the QX80. It's an absolutely huge SUV, but has cameras under each of the side-view mirrors, one up front, and another in the back. From this, they stitch the images together into a 360 degree view that looks like the vehicle is being watched by a satellite above. Despite it's size, it's easier to park than my small Mercedes roadster which is so low that the front splitter can't clear parking blocks, causing a great deal of anxiety every time I pull into a parking space.
Doing what your customers ask without balancing that against a strong sense of why your product is a success leads to "kosher pork chops". It betrays a lack of vision.
I'm a product manager at a large, trendy technology company.
The answer to this question is boring, because it's the same answer that ends up being the answer for most questions in life, generally.
The answer is it depends. Sometimes you listen to customers, sometimes you take a flier on something you think they might like that they haven't answered.
The trick is to try a lot of things and get egos out of the way so that if something sticks that isn't necessarily your idea, you can get on board and enthusiastically move it forward.
Customers don't always have an idea of new things they want, or the solutions to the problems they need fixed, but they very, very often know exactly what's broken.
> Customers don't always have an idea of new things they want, or the solutions to the problems they need fixed, but they very, very often know exactly what's broken.
I think this statement is really insightful and gets to the heart of the issue.
I suspect that customers often really do know what they want, rationally speaking, it's just that purchasing tends to be more impulse and image-driven, divorced from peoples' rational needs. The end result of modern marketing science.
I think the fact that car companies are not tech UI/UX design experts is the reason infotainment systems are so terrible these days. They can design a nice interior, but designing a system that looks nice, works well, and can play nice with iOS/Android/Windows/etc isn't their forte.
Car companies don't usually design these things; heck, most don't design many of the parts of vehicles.
Everything is offloaded to third-party car part manufacturers who make things to an OEM spec (and later supply replacement components to the repair and maintenance market) - but in many cases they also supply their own parts, which can be picked and chosen by the manufacturer.
In the case of infotainment, the standard unit is DIN size; usually double-DIN for most systems today (hidden behind the plastic dash panels); the parts manufacturer designs and builds a number of components and units for that (along with software and such), and the car manufacturer picks it out of a catalog (if there's something that will work). Otherwise a more customized option is done (and then back to your comment of course).
This applies to engines, drivetrains, and virtually every other component of the car, with the exception of the frame and bodywork (interior and exterior) - though even there the part manufacturers lend their hands and expertise to the task, because they have to supply replacement components for those items as well usually.
Many of these parts suppliers used to be wholly owned by the auto manufacturers (some still are), but more than a few are independent as well, and supply parts to various manufacturers. Others are more independent, but only supply to a single manufacturer or brand. All this is to say that an automobile manufacturer today doesn't necessarily do everything completely in-house like they used to. It is much more complicated and fragmented today.
I think there are a couple of reasons vehicle infotainment systems are somewhat bad across the board.
For starters, cars only get redesigned about every 5 years. That means that most major models that are on the market right now, have only had a full screen interface for 2, maybe 3 generations. So manufacturers can't iterate on what works and what doesn't in terms of their design/development process as quickly as other electronic products.
Figuring out how good, is good enough, and what kinds of personnel, suppliers, and processes you need to design an excellent infotainment system is something that naturally took the auto industry a lot longer than say, smartphones or TV's. Because of that, it took a long time for them to even figure out how a car infotainment should fit in with smartphones. And it took a lot of them a long time to figure out that making an interface touchscreen-only for a car is actually an anti-pattern.
I LOVE CarPlay for this exact reason, the OEMs system is terrible.
When I bought the car I read reviews that said it was head and shoulders above the previous model, which terrifies me.
Even if the software was good/fast there’s plenty of hardware problems with the system. It has a nice big touchscreen. They obviously asked around and found out the people love iPhones (surprise) and so obviously doing things with touch is the best way. So they replaced all the physical controls on the radio with capacitive touch strips.
End result? You can’t use any of them without looking at them and being very careful. In the next model year (or perhaps the one after that) they put the controls back as physical buttons. Good.
But, they added a capacitive touch strip to the steering wheel to make it “easy“ to adjust the volume by various amounts. My mom has that car. She CONSTANTLY adjust the volume up or down a whole bunch accidentally do to that control.
All because of a “fad”.
If it wasn’t for the up and down volume buttons (and I mean BUTTONS) on the steering wheel I wouldn’t have bought the car at all.
yes, the customer isn't always right. The customer doesn't understand all the tradeoffs. If you make a car bigger, that comes with lots of compromises: less style, less fuel economy, etc.
The customer isn't always right, but, the customer also didn't ask for glued-in smartphone batteries, removing the MicroSD slot, or removing the headphone jack.
Isn’t that back to the Fordian “faster horse”, though? Or perhaps that falls apart with the glued-in battery, and instead it’s “you can have a faster horse, but we have to take the legs off and install wheels”.
Or maybe analogies just don’t work, and it’s “you want it thin and waterproof? We can do that, but we’re gluing the battery in.” No, customers didn’t ask for such batteries, but customers did ask for other things that require a permanently installed battery.
> Isn’t that back to the Fordian “faster horse”, though?
The Fordian "faster horse" doesn't have much merit, though. What customers wanted was a faster cart. That's also exactly what they got.
What they wanted out of horses was for them to be easier to store, and cheaper and less labor intensive to maintain. They got bicycles and motorcycles.
No, but the customer did ask for cheaper phones. They asked for water proof phones (to infinite depth). They like the way slimmer phones look. All of these conspire to push manufacturers to make the changes you have listed.
> Did they really want thinner phones that were too large to easily fit in a pocket?
For the most part, I think they do. Sony has been offering smaller (4.6", usually) phones for years. They're a little thicker than average, have reasonably competitive specs, fairly stock Android, unlockable bootloaders, SD cards and good cameras. Many of them were even waterproof.
That's pretty much the feature set a large segment of the tech-savvy community has been asking for. How many of us have one?
Meanwhile, phones larger than the current average tend to have strong sales. I think it's mainly driven by people using their phones for an increasing number of tasks they previously would have done on a PC.
What the market asked for is "the new phone", which frees up the manufacturers to select whatever (lack of) features makes their lives easy, and the market has demonstrated that they will keep lining up to buy the newest and most expensive models (so long as it doesn't literally explode in their pockets).
They did. Many of my friends have dropped their phones in the tub or toilet over the years and asked for a phone that wouldn't be destroyed when that happens.
Note that the point is customer behavior in buying does not match their stated desires. I own a fairly small phone that is waterproof (to 1 meter), but everybody I know thinks I'm weird for having an off brand phone.
> The customer doesn't understand all the tradeoffs.
Exactly! "Tuning" technology with the right features is an exercise in tradeoff-management. A better approach would be to ask customers to rank features, either against each other, and/or in general. "Driver visibility is more important to me than styling": [strongly agree][somewhat agree][not sure or mixed feelings][somewhat disagree][strongly disagree]. Of course styling is hard to judge without actually seeing what's at stake, but technical features may be easier to compare without visuals.
However, doing such surveys right will require customers who are ready and willing to take longer surveys. Perhaps give a general brand gift certificate to participants. There are special ways to construct surveys to ensure responses actually reflect customer opinions (consistency checks).
IMHO tradeoffs is the key word here. In all the auto examples, the customers said they liked X, but disliked Y - and then the manufactured fixed Y at some (slight, but still) cost to X, and that wasn't acceptable.
The fact itself that they bought that car is an indicator that to them, X is far more valuable than Y - the "missing" feature is a nice to have thing that they'll consider as a differentiator only if the things they liked in the old car are the same or improved; they're not eager to trade off the feature because of which they bought the old car just to get the missing one.
Don't ask them what they want; rather, ask them which problem they are suffering from with the currently available products.
If you go to a doctor, do you expect him to question you about your ailments or to ask you about how to proceed?
To my experience this is not specific to the car industry only. Many large business try to “ask customers what they want”, because “it’s all about the customer”. And while I agree that many large enterprises have ignored customers for all a long time, this new mantra is the right way either.
I believe a product needs to be designed deliberately to fulfill certain customer needs/desires. The word design contains the element of making choices on behalf of the customer, seldom by customers. I think has been very successful with this approach, even though some of their tradeoff decisions haven’t been so popular, but needless to say that their products are very successful.
Henry Ford said "If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse".
Your job is to figure out what the customer need and sell them that. Sometimes the customer knows better than you do so you need to ask. However you have to beware of letting the customer jump to a solution. Figure out what their issue really is and you can revolutionize your industry. Give them what they say they want, and you take your chances.
Question is which customers are we talking about. Those who could afford a horse would have been happier yes, but I think Ford tapped into a whole new market
I drive a Subaru BRZ. The back seats of it are so small as to be damn near useless. I'm only 5'9" and I can't sit in the back because my head hits the rear window. Even my 10 year old niece complains about the lack of leg room.
Now, if Subaru does research and finds that people are complaining about the small back seats and so they make them bigger, well they've done it wrong. The proper response would be to steer (no pun intended) those customers to a Legacy, Impreza, or WRX.
To make the car larger would destroy what the BRZ was supposed to be: A small, lightweight, inexpensive, economical, nimble sport coupe.
Those vestigial back seats are probably there just to make the car cheaper to insure. A 2-seat sports car screams "death machine" to insurance companies. Not a big deal at the Corvette/Cayman prices level, but arguably quite important at the $30,000 USD price range.
(caveat: this is largely inherited folk wisdom, and I'd be glad for evidence that insurance, at least nowadays, has enough data to realize what car is likely to end up wrapped around a tree)
> Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.
> Obvious but wrong. As Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald explained at the time, if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren’t very dangerous. What you really want to do is armor up the areas that, on average, don’t have any bullet holes. Why? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back. That’s why you don’t see any bullet holes there on the ones that do return. Clever!
The relevance of this is left as an excercise for the enterprising reader.
Okay, don't ask customers, but do think about it a bit. They don't want yet another smartphone, physically embedded in their car running crappy, insecure, counterintuitive, out of date software.
They've already got a smartphone. They already know how to use it's UI. Did you know people drive different cars sometimes?
They don't want or need to be able to order Dunkin Donuts from the crappy, insecure, out of date smartphone welded to their dashboard. If they want Dunkin Donuts, they'll order them from the smartphone they already have. Glueing it into the dashboard doesn't make it any safer to operate underway, and if they've got to stop anyway - they'll use their smartphone. And it isn't going to make you many dollars off those Dunkin Donuts referrals.
It seems they would like a way to hook up the smartphone they already have to the car speakers, and possibly even a microphone, built-in somewhere near the driver. Ideally multiple ways, since phone makers keep changing the game.
Maybe add some physical tactile control buttons, for volume for example. Maybe that attached device needs to be controlled. You might be tempted to put a touchscreen in there. Don't.
They've already got a touchscreen, which is unsafe to use while driving. Give them more knobs and buttons they can use by feel. If you don't give them another touchscreen.. they won't use what you didn't give them.
If you must put in a screen, make DAMN sure that the software (and hardware!) behind it is as relevant as you think you can manage for the expected lifetime of the car. Like 10 years. How about 20 years? This might seem like an opportunity for planned obsolescence - it isn't. Just do it well, and do it right.
If it absolutely must be more than just an audio+mic jack and some buttons then:
* make it as secure as you can make it, and can be updated, securely (thumb drives with checksums are good, wireless, not so much).
* it is as bug-free as you can make it, and has the fewest possible features you can get away with - on the assumption that your customers will always have a <= 18 month old smartphone in their hands
Sure - we can rip out the crap from the factory, and we will, but that is just more waste. Please do it right and maybe save us all some hassle.
Interesting artile. My opinion, buying a car is a compromise decision. You pick the feature(s) you most value and also factor in how much money you want to spend. If the most appealing feature to you is no longer present in follow up model then the car doesn't have the same appeal.
Personally I don't understand why pick up vans are becoming more curvy. I prefer the more square type.
> Personally I don't understand why pick up vans are becoming more curvy. I prefer the more square type.
Probably fuel economy to meet CAFE standards (at least here in America - which probably bleeds over to other markets); same reason why bodies (and eventually frames) going to aluminum...
Ah thanks. I am sticking to the old school models for now. In Africa it is easier anyway to fix the old noncomputerized cars. It costs an arm and a leg to just get a reading to tell you what is wrong with your modern car.
This would be more compelling if it was not set in the backdrop of advertising. Advertising is an entire industry set up to mislead the consumer, with the aim of getting the consumer to make choices that they wouldn't ordinarily have made by their own. This is adequate explanation of why people don't buy things they 'want'.
I think a quintessential modern version of this is the Scion xB. We have the original style, 2005 version. We love ours, and the current plan is to drive it until the wheels fall off, then go buy new wheels. Great mileage, great dog car, throw a rack on top to carry bikes, and it's zippy enough for what it is. I've hauled a couch in it, because my buddy's Chevy Equinox SUV couldn't. It's basically a small, 35mpg SUV. We checked every box on the options list, and it still came in at $20K If you were to ask me what could be done to improve it, meh, could use a little more power than the 110bhp it puts out now. I mean, if you have to have an answer.
And here's the problem the article addresses: yes, I said it could use more power, but not at the expense of mileage efficiency. That's the mistake that Ford and Cadillac made: yes, you did what customers asked, but at the expense of other things that the customer assumed wouldn't change when they answered the question. So what do we get a few years later for a Scion xB? A 50bhp power boost, but at the expense of its awesome fuel efficiency. Wanna know why we bought the xB and not a Honda Element or some Subaru that might be more fitting to our needs? Because the xB gets 35mpg and the Honda and Subie don't. Now that Scion's fuel efficiency is down there with the Honda and Subie, well, why don't I just buy the Forrester I'd rather have were it not for the fuel efficiency? They don't make the xB anymore, for whatever reason, and Toyota's suggested replacement is just another generic crossover that is nothing like the xB is supposedly replaces. I want my lunchbox-on-wheels back. Instead, I guess we'll buy a Subaru when the time comes.
So go ahead and customers what they want. Then feel free to go do it, as long as you can do it without screwing up the character of the model. (Which, admittedly, is exactly what the last paragraph of TFA says.)
Customer feedback should be just one of the data points a product planner/owner uses when deciding on what to do in the next version of a product. Sadly, in an effort to become "customer-focused" many people forget this fact.
I just want a car with OTA updates that is affordable (a.k.a. not Tesla). My current car has a bug where the crash mitigation system always gets triggered at a specific spot with white lines on the road. I can easily reproduce the issue, so the car maker should be able to fix it. This is, however, never going to happen.
People get angry when a $700 phone isn't being maintained 2,5 years after they're released. But we all accept that a $30,000 won't get updates as soon as you drive out the dealership. (Well, except for maps, which are often paid and at lease half a year behind.)
I've been working in the UX realm for a while now. I've refined my understanding of this (paradoxical?) problem as such: Listen to the customers, hear out what features they want. Learn how they use the existing features. Observe your competitors, and how their products are used. Understand the general "spirit" underlying the specifics. Design and implement a feature set that best satisfies the spirit, and touches upon some of the specific requests.
I'm just surprised that anyone can have this discussion without mentioning the Pontiac Aztek, which allegedly was designed to tick all the most-requested feature boxes, but ended up being... the Aztek.
Or you end up in Zune territory where behind every joke punchline is a quiet voice in the audience saying, "Yeah, but they're actually really good..."
You know, this is good advice for a lot of enterprises today. We are too focused on giving the customer exactly what they think they want vs. doing the hard work of anticipating what they will want. A lot of PMs are guilty of this. Like spending all your time flying around to meet with customers to chit chat.
I've seen this backfire twice at software firms. One instance involved 10+ contractors being added for a feature that was not yet approved or sold to a client, when the green light was never given those contractors were let go.
Getting manual transmission with all of the other bells and whistles is pretty tough as well in North America. As soon as you want a package that isn't the very basic, in comes the automatic.
Steve Jobs would not approve of how auto makers do this, even though the article pretends to quote his style. It actually doesn't and falls prey to the one-at-a-time test problem.
idk, the 1967 thunderbird looks like poor execution. They completely changed the look and feel of the car. Customers didn't say I want a larger car, higher off the ground, + 4 seats. They just wanted the 4 seats. You need to make sure you aren't changing the character and utility of a product while adding features, because at that point, your really releasing a new production, not an improved one.
That's pretty much what the article says, yes? They took opinions on specific features, implemented them, and inadvertently moved the car into a different niche ... one that had few customers. That's the whole point Lutz is making.
Of all the people in the automotive industry, the one I would most like to shake hands with is Maximum Bob.
This is exactly what jobs said too. On many occasions. And in different ways. Skate to where the puck will be... people don’t know what they want until you show them... etc.
The irony of this is that phrase is actually the answer to "why isn't anyone buy my stuff?", and the answer is "because they don't think it is good enough value and the customer is always right".
Good marketing doesn't ask "what do you want" it asks "what problems do you have".
The tale told about Ford is they old "they would have said they wanted faster horses". And that's why Ford didn't have a market research department for a hundred years. This, like many things Ford did (e.g. full vertical integration), was poor a strategy.
Studio execs are constantly trying to make characters more likeable or artificially raise the stakes of the scene. Some characters should do unlikeable things at times, then it's even more rewarding when they redeem themselves at the end. Or you want a really memorable villain. Some stories just have fairly low stakes.
Some of the most successful writers talk about reading "the note behind the note". They take the criticism, but don't make the exact adjustment the exec is looking for. They take it as an indicator the character isn't developed enough yet or the story isn't engrossing enough. If the exec were absorbed by the writing more their mind wouldn't wander enough to add a note.
I think that's a good attitude to have when producing anything of great complexity. The fact a customer has a comment doesn't mean you should just implement what they asked for, it means you should really look to understand what they value in the current product and enhance that.