Hotel Room 1931, by Edward Hopper
NYTimes has a story about how hotels and airports have started to notice that their customers like to carry laptops and use the Internets when they travel. OMG, who knew?
It’s fun to snark at big companies for missing the obvious, but I don’t think this kind of blindness is unique to large organizations. We all have difficulties seeing ourselves (or our products, or our services, or our blog posts) the way other people see them. So, we don’t see the obvious flaws. Nor do we catch the obvious needs.
That’s why it’s critical to get outside our own preconceptions and misconceptions and see what reality looks like to our customers, clients and users.
I’m not necessarily suggesting focus groups or surveys. They have their uses, but depend on people’s proven inability to accurately and honestly report their recollections, opinions and intentions. Rather, I’m talking about observation: watching people use your product and behave in your environment.
Observation can take a number of forms. One is usability testing, in which you watch people try to use the thing you created and note where people encounter problems. Another is ethnographic observation, in which you watch people do what they do in their natural environment. For instance, if you make dishwashers, you might observe people washing their own dishes in their own homes.
It sounds so simple and so obvious. And it is. And that’s why it’s really worth doing. If you’re looking to find out what your customers need, don’t ask, but watch. It’s like that Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Back to the NYT article, it seems that Marriott spent some time observing guests.
“When we tested our new bedding, we discovered people were taking the decorative pillows and they were using them to essentially nestle in and pull out their laptop. They were using the pillows to create a desk.”
A small observation, and probably just one of many, but tremendously valuable. People not only want to use their laptops, but they want to do so in bed (and while eating and drinking, I’ll bet). But there is no easy way to do so. Yet, if you were to survey or interview customers about what they want in a hotel room, you probably wouldn’t uncover this need to simultaneously compute and watch TV in bed. You’d have every reason to think that the typical hotel room bed-desk-TV arrangement is perfectly fine.
Read On the Job, Everywhere at nytimes.com
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