Seeing Is Believing

American Demographics

Marketing Research

Seeing Is Believing

by Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport

Empathic design uses observation to get at needs and wants that the customers themselves might not even recognize

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review. Adapted from "Spark Innovation Through Emphatic Design," by Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport, Harvard Business Review (November-December 1997). Copyright 1997 by President and Fellows of Harvard College; all rights reserved.

Almost every company competes to some degree on the basis of continual innovation. And to be commercially successful, new product and service ideas must, of course, meet a real or perceived customer need. The problem is that the ability of customers to guide the development of new products and services is limited by their experience and ability to imagine and describe possible innovations. How can companies identify needs that customers themselves may not recognize?

A set of techniques we call empathic design can help resolve those dilemmas. At its foundation is observation -- watching consumers use products or services. But unlike usability laboratories and other contexts of traditional market research, such observation is conducted in the customer's own environment, in the course of everyday routines. In such a context, researchers can gain access to a host of information that is not accessible through other observation-oriented research methods.

Few companies are set up to employ empathic design; the techniques require unusual collaborative skills that many organizations have not developed. Developing the expertise, however, is a worthy investment. Empathic design is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to identify potentially critical customer needs. It's an important source of new product ideas, and it has the potential to redirect a company's technological capabilities toward entirely new businesses.

When Questions Don't Yield Answers

When a product or service is well understood, traditional marketing science provides amazingly sophisticated ways to gain useful information from potential customers. Conventional practices are also effective in situations where consumers are already familiar with a proposed solution to a problem because of their experiences with it in a different context. Peel-away postage stamps were an innovation that customers could comprehend because they had already encountered the light adhesives used in peel-away labels.

But sometimes customers are so accustomed to current conditions that they don't think to ask for a new solution -- even if they have real needs that could be addressed.

For example, when asked about an editing function in a software package, one customer had no complaints -- until she sat down to use the program in front of the observer. Then she realized that her work was disrupted when the program did not automatically wrap text around graphics while she edited. Accustomed to working around the problem, she had not mentioned it in earlier interviews.

Market research is also generally unhelpful when a company has developed a technological capability that is not tied to a familiar consumer paradigm. If no current product exists in the market that embodies at least the most primitive form of a new product, consumers have no foundation on which to formulate their opinions.

Empathic-design techniques cannot replace market research; rather, they contribute to the flow of ideas that need further scientific testing before a company commits itself to any full-fledged development project. Empathic design techniques can yield at least five types of information that cannot be gathered through traditional marketing or product research:

1) Triggers of Use. What circumstances prompt people to use your product or service? Do your customers turn to your offering in the way you expected? If they don't, there may be an opportunity for your company.

When the brand manager for a spray-on cooking oil saw his neighbor using the product on the bottom of his lawn mower, he discovered an entirely unexpected trigger. Pressed to explain, the neighbor pointed out that the oil prevented cut grass from adhering to the bottom of the mower and did no harm to the lawn. Such unanticipated usage patterns can identify opportunities not only for innovation and product redesign, but also for entering entirely new markets.

2) Interactions with the User's Environment. How does your product or service fit into your users' own idiosyncratic systems, whether they be a household routine, an office operation, or a manufacturing process? Consider what Intuit, maker of the personal-finance software package Quicken, learns through its "Follow Me Home" program, in which product developers gain permission from first-time buyers to observe their initial experience with the software in their own homes. This is the only reliable way for Intuit to learn what other software applications are running on that customer's system, and how that software can interfere with or complement Quicken's own operation. Moreover, product developers can see what other data files the customer refers to and might wish to access directly, what state of organization or disarray such files are in, and whether they are on paper or in electric form. It was from such in-home observations that Intuit designers discovered that many small-business owners were using Quicken to keep their books, leading to a whole new product line.

3) User Customization. Do users reinvent or redesign your products to serve their own purposes? Producers of industrial equipment observed users taping pieces of paper to their product to serve as identifying labels. The manufacturer gained an inexpensive advantage over the competition when it incorporated a flat protected space for such machine-specific information into its next model. And every Japanese automaker has set up a design studio in southern California, because fanatical car owners there are prone to modifying their cars, often substantially. Observing these users helps designers at Nissan and Toyota envision the potential evolution of specific models, and gives them a window on the possible future of cars and trucks in general.

4) Intangible Attributes of the Product. What kinds of peripheral or intangible attributes does your product or service have? Customers rarely name such attrib-utes in focus groups or surveys, but those unseen factors may constitute a kind of emotional franchise -- and thus an opportunity.

After visiting the homes of Kimberly-Clark customers, consultants at the Palo Alto, California design firm GVO recognized the emotional appeal of pull-on diapers to both parents and toddlers, who saw them as a step toward "grownup" dress. Huggies Pull-Ups were rolled out nationally in 1991, and by the time competitors caught on, Pull-Ups' annual sales were $400 million.

5) Unarticulated User Needs. The application of empathic design that holds the greatest potential benefit is the observation of current or possible customers encountering problems with your products or services that they don't know can be addressed, and may not even recognize as problems.

A product developer from Hewlett-Packard observed a surgeon at work in an operating room. The surgeon was guiding his scalpel by watching the patient's body and his own hands displayed on a television screen. As nurses walked around the room, they would periodically obscure the surgeon's view of the screen for a few seconds. No one complained. But this unacknowledged problem caused the developer to ponder the possibility of creating a lightweight helmet that could suspend the images a few inches in front of the surgeon's eyes. Her company had the technology to create such a product, but the surgeon would never have thought to ask for it.

Empathic Design: the Process

Companies can engage in empathic design, or similar techniques such as contextual inquiry, in a variety of ways. However, most employ the following five-step process:
Step One: Observation. It's important to clarify who should be observed, who should do the observing, and what the observer should be watching.

Who should be observed? These individuals may be customers, noncustomers, or a group of individuals who, by playing different roles, collectively perform a task.

Who should do the observing? Differences in training, education, and natural inclinations predispose different people to extract very different information when watching the exact same situation. The best way to capture the most important aspects of an environment is to send out a small team, each member of which has expertise in a different discipline (ergonomics, design, etc.). Because a critical objective of such an expedition is to match the unarticulated needs of users with technological possibilities, at least one member should have experience in behavioral observation and another should have a deep understanding of the organizational capabilities the development team can draw upon. When the team comes from an outside consulting firm, some of the client's employees should be included to provide that deep understanding.

What behavior should be observed? The people being observed should be carrying out normal routines: playing, eating, relaxing, or working at home or at the office. Few people, of course, are totally oblivious to a team of people hanging over their shoulders, observing them at work or play. But a real-life atmosphere -- even a slightly stilted one -- is still better than the highly artificial setting of a focus-group conference room or a laboratory.

Step Two: Capturing Data. Because empathic-design techniques stress observation over inquiry, relatively few data are gathered through responses to questions. When they wish to know how to interpret people's actions, observers may ask a few very open-ended questions, such as "Why are you doing that?" But most data are gathered from visual, auditory, and sensory cues. Thus empathic-design teams very frequently use photography and videography tools.

Videos can capture subtle, fleeting body language that may convey large amounts of information and store it for future review and analysis. Even still photographs convey information that can be lost in verbal descriptions. Nissan Design International (NDI) commissioned a photographer to take pictures of people in trucks to better understand how they were being used as commuter and family cars. NDI designers were startled to discover how little their trucks (and those of competitors) were actually used for the purposes that were advertised and reported in market surveys. NDI president Hirsh-berg was surprised to see how many people were eating in trucks: "Not just drinks, but whole spaghetti dinners!" The designers also noticed how scuffed up some trucks were. They began to wonder if some vehicles should be more like denim and look better the more worn they got.

Photographs or drawings (which artists and designers can produce on the spot) show spatial arrangements and contain details that may have gone unnoticed while the team was on location. Backyard barbecue pictures taken for the Thermos company, which was working on a new charcoal grill, showed women struggling with equipment designed for the generally greater height and upper body strength of men, who were (incorrectly) assumed to be the most likely outdoor family chefs.

Step Three: Reflection and Analysis. After gathering data in many forms, the team members return to reflect on what they have observed and to review their visual data with other colleagues, who -- unhampered by possibly extraneous information, such as the reputations of the individuals visited -- will focus on the data before them and see different things. They will ask questions that may well send the team out for further observation. It is at this point that the team tries to identify all of its customers' possible problems and needs.

Step Four: Brainstorming for Solutions. Brainstorming is a valuable part of any innovation process. Within the empathic-design process, it is used specifically to transform the observations into graphic, visual representations of possible solutions.

Although brainstorming is generally associated with a creative process, it is not undisciplined. Managers at IDEO tell their employees to heed five rules: defer judgment, build on the ideas of others, hold one conversation at a time, stay focused on the topic, and encourage wild ideas.
Step Five: Developing Prototypes of Possible Solutions. The more radical an innovation, the harder it is to understand how it should look, function, and be used. Just as researchers gather useful visual data, so too can they stimulate communication by creating some physical representation of a new concept for a product or service. Prototypes clarify the concept of the new product or service for the development team and other individuals who work in functions not formally represented on the team. Because of their concreteness, prototypes can also stimulate reaction and foster discussion with potential customers.

A common criticism of the kinds of innovative ideas arising through empathic design is, "But users haven't asked for that." Precisely. By the time they do, your competitors will have the same new-product ideas you have, and you will be in the "me-too" game of copying and improving their ideas. Empathic-design techniques involve a twist on the idea that new-product development should be guided by users. In this approach, they still do -- they just don't know it.

About the authors

Dorothy Leonard is the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration, and Jeffrey F. Rayport is an associate professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business S