I finished two books over the weekend with polarized views on customer involvement in product design.
First, Groundswell (p.194):
We’re not suggesting that a company like Apple turn its development over to its customers - that would be a tragic waste of talent. No, the companies that win by embracing their customers incorporate those suggestions into their own development and process strengths. The customers don’t tell these companies what to do - they just make suggestions. The difference is, these companies are listening to and acting on many of those suggestions. That’s what accelerates innovation - starting a conversation with your customers and using your skills to understand and exploit their knowledge.
I agree with most of this, but frankly the first line seems somewhat like fence sitting. Especially when compared to Inside Steve’s Brain (p. 63):
A lot of companies like to say they’re customer-centric. They approach their users and ask them what they want. This so-called user-centric innovation is driven by feedback and focus groups. But Jobs shuns laborious studies of users locked in a conference room. He plays with the new technology himself, noting his own reactions to it, which is given as feedback to his engineers. If something is too hard to use, Jobs gives instructions for it to be simplified. Anything that is unnecessary or confusing is to be removed. If it works for him, it’ll work for Apple’s customers.
From our experience at Praxis, users have definitely been a powerful force in improving our LanguagePod platform, but bigger, step changes - for good and bad - tend to be more the result of a vision for how we see the service evolving.
