Course 16: Innovating from Field Data: Driving the Voice of the Customer Into Solutions That Transform Lives -
CourseContribution & Benefit: This course teaches how the best ideas are produced when the inner “design compass” is educated by customer data. Participants interact with customer data and use it to generating ideas.
Abstract » You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
This comment by Steve Jobs generated a heated discussion within the high tech community that continues to rage. It’s being held up as evidence that user-centered design is a waste of time, there’s no need to expend the effort needed to get customer input since they can’t tell you anything useful.
Is Steve Jobs right? Only if you take his quote literally. Jobs is correct in saying that asking customers, “What do you want?” and then giving it to them is a prescription for failure. But what do we use instead as our source of innovation? Our own ideas based on our creativity? Or is there a better way?
In this course, we show how the best ideas are produced when a designer’s inner “design compass” is educated by customer data. We discuss how successful innovation—practical innovation—arises from a deep understanding of customer needs. We explain how customer data is used to reveal customer needs, generate insights and produce designs that would not have otherwise happened. We show several real-world examples of how teams discovered new product ideas by using customer data, illustrated with the actual customer data and its connection to the new idea. Participants interact with actual customer data so they can experience its power for generating ideas