You may find an anthropologist inside.

When it comes to discovering what it is that customers really need, perhaps Yogi Berra said it best: "You can observe a lot just by watching." A wide range of observation-based research tools, originating in the study of human anthropology, are being adapted to the world of product design and development. At the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network In Sight conference on November 2, a number of experienced practitioners gave each other a peek into their own research toolboxes.

If you haven’t checked your professional product development research toolbox lately, you might find some new gear you’ve never tried before. More that 100 attendees at a November 2 Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network symposium got a toolbox tour that just might give them an edge in their own product development efforts.

Smile

When, for example, was the last time you followed customers around with a video camera? Don DeLauder, Director of Product Innovation and Advanced Development at MEDRAD, was bullish on video for “capturing a tremendous amount of data to discover opportunities, identify customer requirements, and understand their environments.” That technique is one of several formally known as ‘ethnographic research’ – the qualitative description of human social phenomena based on fieldwork, according to Wikipedia.

Medrad sends teams to record customers’ routine use of the Company’s products in their own environments. The trick, advised DeLauder, is having practical techniques to analyze, organize and transform the data into actionable information. Hours of video must be cataloged and stored in a database for easy access. One typical project amassed 69 hours of video from 14 site visits in the U.S. and Europe. It is not a cheap proposition. According to DeLauder, videography studies have cost his company anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000.

Even so, support for the field observation research approach is growing. “Fifteen years ago, we at CMU were talking about the need to understand your user community,” keynote speaker Dan Boyarski observed. “But that research was seen as costly and time-consuming.” However, he noted, those perceptions are changing as companies begin to discover the value of these techniques. “More and more companies are either hiring people to do this research for them, or they’re doing it in-house,” he said.

The Shadow

Daedelus-Excel’s Matt Beale and ThoughtForm’s Don Moyer cautioned that the makeup of the research team can sometimes have an unintended impact on its results. All team members must be coached ahead of time to remain neutral throughout the process. Be especially aware of the individual agendas of team members so that their biases don’t get imprinted on the research. The salesperson, for example, must be reminded not to try selling new products or features that are not yet available. The engineer should refrain from discussing technical attributes that the customer may not understand. And, if you’re taking along an industrial designer, she must avoid inventing solutions on the spot that the customer might not be interested in. Beale and Moyer recommend starting out with open-ended questions and narrowing the discussion down to more concrete ideas as you go along.

DeLauder coaches his researchers to “become invisible” during these observational visits. He also emphasizes the need to “notice little details that might otherwise be overlooked.” The goal is to “paint the customer’s image in his or her own terms,” he explained. Another technique is called ‘shadowing,’ where you spend time following subjects through their normal daily activities, making detailed notes about your observations.

Supersize me

Craig Coulter, Co-founder and Chief Scientist for HyperActive Technologies, has taken shadowing to the next level. To better understand automation opportunities in the fast food industry, Coulter took a job as a cook for a local McDonald’s restaurant.

“If we didn’t understand what was going on in intimate detail,” Coulter explained, “our solution was going to be completely misaligned.” The root problem, he observed, was the impact of a changing workforce on this $132 billion industry. His solution involved the application of intelligent robotics.

The theory of fast-food economics, according to Coulter, is to “take $3 million worth of capital equipment, add a minimum-wage labor pool, and then train them to consistently and repetitively perform fairly intricate tasks.” But many of today’s teenagers feel no need to put in hours behind the counter, wearing a hat and a smile, like their parents might have done at their ages. So McDonald’s and its competitors are forced to staff their restaurants with mostly older, slower, and mentally challenged workers.

Coulter’s theory was that store managers are the key to each restaurant’s success. So he focused on affecting whatever managers were most concerned about: reducing labor costs, improving speed of service, reducing product waste, and improving food quality.

His experience taught him that improved timing led to better decisions in the kitchen. By installing a camera on the store roof to track customer traffic and by collecting point of sale information on what customers were buying, the process of communicating food preparation needs back to the kitchen could be automated. Coulter’s system frees store managers to focus on customer service and store management. And for the first time, many diners found that when their food arrived, it was actually hot!

Robo Rx

Contextual inquiry is an observational technique used by McKesson Provider Technologies in developing two new automated medicine dispensers for community hospitals. “The alternative to using ethnographic research was developing new products in our cubicles with blinders on and using filtered information,” according to McKesson’s Product Marketing Manager, Randy Quinn.” Instead, McKesson sent out a team including the product managers, technical leaders, and engineers. In one case, the team took lots of photos of hospital pharmacy picking stations, nursing activities, tools, and hospital pharmacy shelving. They charted the workflow of how a doctor’s order turns into a prescription and how the medication gets to the patient. They also made sketches of relevant spaces.

From it, they were able to establish both the perceived and latent needs of their customers. Perceived needs are defined by Quinn as requirements that customers are able to articulate; latent needs are those requirements that customers are unable to express. In fact, explained Quinn, the “customer may not be consciously aware of them or may think they’re impossible to fill.” For example, many nurses commented that their feet were killing them. That’s the perceived need. The latent need is to get the nurses off their feet. So their product now includes a motorized lift that enables a nurse seated in a chair to complete her pharmacy transactions.

Dramatis personae

Two relative newcomers to Respironics, Tom Bonnell and Paul McGroary, are introducing innovative observational techniques they had used in previous employment. Bonnell is a big fan of sending cameras out to customers and asking them to photograph a product in use, which is much cheaper than sending out teams to do observation. And, when your product is used in the bathroom or bedroom, as are Respironics’ sleep apnea products, this less invasive method is also more appropriate.

In addition, Respironics’ designers make use of what McGroary called ‘personas and scenarios.’ The persona is an archetype representing a particular group of users. It is fictitious but based on fact about real users. Personas put the attitudes, artifacts and environments of all the users into context so there is a clear customer focus for both the design team and management. They also help take away personal bias when designing a product or interface. A scenario describes the persona’s patterns of interaction with the product and with other personae.

“Keep in mind that personas and scenarios are not perfect,” advised McGroary. “They can never replace getting direct feedback from real customers.” However, he noted, it is a useful technique for getting at customers’ needs and requirements – and it requires only a fraction of the cash outlay of on-site visits.

Cathy Brennan is a Contributing Writer for the Pittsburgh Product Strategy Network. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it