Asking customers for what you don't already know

Danny, a colleague at Ironworks, shared an interesting article by Mark Hurst about assessing customer needs.  Mark's friend owns an organic fruit company and wanted to update his web site.  He obviously needed to start with better understanding his customers' needs and how they wanted to use his site.

When we conduct focus groups or usability testing to do this, we often start with specific scenarios to test based on what we predict customers will want to do or what we want them to do.  However, Mark and his friend were concerned that they would only test known problems and would not uncover unexpected challenges that users may experience.

They decided to replace standard usability testing with "listening labs" in order to generate a more iterative or "organic" experience.  This less-structured approach (which could also be applied to focus groups or usabiltity testing) helped them discover some new issues and potential solutions that would not likely have been identified during the standard test scenarios.

I would like to experiment with this approach with some of our future user research and will let you know how it goes.

Tagged: Mark Hurst usability testing listening labs focus groups