The concept of User Centered Design, People Centered design, and Experience Design, sometimes described as Empathic Design, all tend to hinge upon understanding the Customers context, mindset, or point of view. Many techniques like contextual interviews, ethnography, ‘living with customers’ are touted as a means to this end, so why are businesses so reluctant to spend a dime on this? It’s strange to me, because so many design consultancies position themselves around the concept of User Experience and Customer Experience and even when they’re hired contextual research is one of the first things to go out the window, or at least off the statement of work.
Here are some common objections:
- We know our customers
- You know our customers
- You know this industry
- We’ve already done the market research
Here’s a couple of ideas for selling contextual research:
- Don’t sell general concepts, it sounds interesting but when it comes to writing a check the client doesn’t want to pay for you to "live with users"
- Tie the research to specific deliverables, and demonstrate how they form a foundation of success for the project
- Be clear about the specific questions you need to answer, that way you can demonstrate the inadequacies of the generic market research the client is trying to fob you off with
Now for some caveats, yes I know there are some great contextual research companies out there that are doing very well (our own Steve Portigal for instance 
I just feel that some hybrid companies that sell the design/build aspect could do better at selling the contextual research side of things. I’d love to hear success stories as well as other common objections or problems.
4 comments so far
I’ve had a couple of experiences in this past week with two new prospective clients who haven’t ever been involved with this sort of research before. We’re discussing proposals and in both cases there’s nervousness about the process and a great deal of highly detailed questions.
It seems that I’m being asked to explain a lot about the process in order to presumably reassure. But of course, the things that they are able to fix on for reassurance are hardly the big issues; their business issues that we’re hoping to address with the research. Rather they are concerned with how we would recruit participants - one asked, in a proposal reviewing meeting, what the actual text of the email that we would be sending out. We’ve been asked to explain what kind of questions we would be asking in a third phase of evaluation research.
Of course, I have some of that consultant’s typical frustration with clients who don’t magically understand what I want and simply sign big checks and say go ahead but really it’s interesting to look at what isn’t understood on the face, and where the items of reassurance seem to be.
I’m not sure that either project will go forward - at all, or if someone else will get the work (and with what process?).
I believe it’s really important to include some “teaching” in the work, but ideally that’s something one has control over. In this proposal phase, both prospects, it feels very out of our control, that we’re just “reacting” to whatever areas of confusion are emerging.
It’s a unique experience for me, and to find two at the same time with the same flavor of concerns is a good opportunity for me to learn more about what is and isn’t easily understood and how to do the best job possible at what mrkook (!) has outlined.
mrkook is now karl long, I had opened a typepad account a long time ago with that author name
I’ve been an in-house interaction designer at a company for almost 2 years now and *still* am met with reluctance when I ask to talk to customers. I know there are a couple of reasons:
1) Politics. The Marketing and Sales departments “own” the customer and don’t want anyone else to interact with them.
2) Outright mistrust. It is assumed that I–since I’m not a trained salesman–will blurt out some feature or promise to a customer that we can’t deliver on. This is the one that makes me the most angry, and I cannot seem to convince my bosses I have been dealing with clients and customers for years, that I will be respectful and polite, and that I won’t fucking tell them we that feature X is vaporware or that feature Y is because Microsoft asked us for it.
3) Money. Even though we have happy customers that speak to us on the phone every day, my bosses assume that *me* speaking to them, or showing them wireframes or watching them walk me through how they use the app, will somehow cost money.
Thanks Andrew, great examples, and that’s in house. Fear of anyone other than salespeople talking to customers is one that I hadn’t been thinking of explicitly but when you mentioned it, it rang so true.
In almost every company I’ve ever worked with they are always a work in progress, with different levels of disfunction and tacit culture. I think the more open and innovative companies just accept that, and other companies fear that the world will discover that they don’t know what they’re doing if they don’t tightly control everything.