If You Want to Outsmart Competitors, Make it Policy for Employees to Use Their Products

In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:

When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. “That upsets me, not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against.”

This is refreshing statement; many executives would have berated their employees for not keeping the faith while a company faced its biggest crisis.

Don’t Enforce a Monoculture

One of the surest ways of losing touch with real customers’ needs and getting outsmarted by competitors is to enforce a monoculture in your organization, where competitive products are banned and employees only come into contact with your own offerings.

My first job out of college was at Sun Microsystems, and in those days (early 90’s) it was forbidden to have any competitive products, whether they were from Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Apple, or Dell. Since Sun made hardware and software, only Sun machines running the Sun operating system were allowed. (In the design group we did have a couple of Macs as the software we needed wasn’t available for Sun’s OS, but they had to be kept hidden away and bought and maintained clandestinely.)

As a result, every Sun employee lived in a Sun monoculture. This was unlike the environment most Sun customers inhabited, where there was a mix of hardware, software, and platforms from a variety of different vendors. Customers had to deal with integration issues that were never felt by Sun staff. Furthermore, Sun employees were “shielded” from understanding what competitive products could really do, or from gaining insights into how they might be falling short, or actually meeting customer needs better in some ways than Sun’s products.

I remember when we were starting a new project that we had to visit the nearby Oracle headquarters (ironically, now Sun’s owner) to get our hands on a wide variety of competitive hardware, as Oracle had to test its software on all platforms and manufacturers. We learned more in those few hours of hands-on tire-kicking than we would have been able to in weeks of desk research.

Encourage Competitive Use, Don’t Punish It

Too often, buying and trying competitive products is frowned upon and even seen as a moral weakness. As I wrote about in Innovation X, when the team developing the second-generation Ford Taurus bought a Toyota Camry (with great difficulty) to try it out, it brought to light critical quality factors that significantly changed how the team approached its work. In her exhaustive book about this project, Mary Walton describes how buying competitive cars, especially Japanese ones, was seen as practically treasonous at Ford in the 1980’s.

This attitude is not healthy. You should encourage people at all levels — starting at the top — to be immersed in your competitors’ offerings, just as they should be immersed in understanding your customers’ lives. Without a clear-eyed, honest perspective about how you are superior and where you are falling short, you will fall into a falsely narrow view of the world.

Walton also noted how Ford executives (as is the case at most car companies) were regularly given new cars, and all servicing was handled by in-house technicians. They never had to deal with oil changes, indifferent dealerships, older cars starting to wear out (since they got replaced so frequently), or any of the other annoyances that can come from car ownership. They lived in a perfect bubble that hid the quality advances their Japanese competitors were making in strides.

Go Further

Don’t just encourage competitive usage, but make it policy. It’s not always easy to do in some B2B cases, but for almost any consumer product or service there’s really no reason why this can’t become a regular practice.

Pay for products and services out of the company purse. Don’t rely on people to pay it for themselves (because many won’t, or will resent having to). Invest in paying for dummy or shadow service accounts, such as wireless or entertainment subscriptions, even insurance policies. Just because you may offer employees a discount on your own products or services doesn’t mean that they can’t also be encouraged to try out the competition.

Think like a library and make sure competitive offerings get passed around to different employees, and aren’t just used by one person. Maximize the exposure and therefore the learning.

Hire curious people who seek out competitors and venture to the edges of your business to find the potential disruptors, trying out products and services that you may not see as current competitors but who may become ones in the future.

Have people formally or informally report on what they find so that others can gain the insights even if they didn’t use the competitors firsthand (this becomes a type of pre-emptive knowledge management).

Backed up by concrete actions such as these, you can establish a culture where trying competitive products is not seen as the height of treason, but as loyalty.

(This article originally appeared at Harvard Business Review Online, and was re-posted at Business Insider.)

What Good is Design Research?

A recent article by Don Norman brings up some valuable and provocative questions about the value of design research. I read it as an extension of his previous shift in thinking about the value of usability analysis, where he concluded that it was vital for good to design, but it didn’t lead to great design. In this new article he argues that design research has not led to breakthrough innovations or products, but is better suited for improving existing products and technologies.

I actually agree with much of what he says, though I see the definition of design research he’s using as overly narrow. More on that in a moment.

He starts the article with:

I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.

He then goes on to list a number of breakthrough products (actually categories of products) that design research didn’t have a hand in:

• The Airplane
• The Automobile
• The Telephone
• The Radio
• The Television
• The Computer
• The Personal Computer
• The Internet
• SMS Text Messaging
• The Cellphone

Design research did not exist in its current form when any of these technologies or products came about, so of course it did not have a hand in their development. However, the reason these ones took off was because someone recognized a user need, and shaped the technologies to address that need, adjusting the form of the technologies as the need evolved. So it was not formal design research, but it certainly was an attentiveness to understanding how the technology would be used, which is a key element of design research.

Invention and Innovation

We have to be careful about distinguishing between technological invention, and innovation. Technologies are invented all the time, many of which - as Don notes - are not immediately very useful, and which need refinement before they can become appealing to the mass-market. This is often where innovation plays a role, and where design research can help shape the rough technology into something that people will actually want and be able to use. I don’t see any shame in design research not being present at the moment of invention - it still has a valuable role to play.

Design research takes place when design happens, and design is a downstream activity from scientific and technology invention. So it’s not surprising that it has not launched new-to-the-world technologies. Could it do so in the future? Sure, it’s early days yet. To have that kind of impact it would need to move more upstream, and to an extent that process is already underway.

But I do agree with Don’s basic point that gaining a deep understanding of user needs does not in and of itself necessarily lead to a reframing of a technology or a business problem. This touches on something that we have been talking about a lot at frog recently - the pendulum has swung so much toward doing user research that we (as a profession) risk losing the magic that comes from conceptual thinking. The seductiveness of evidence and insight that comes from design research can push inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking to the sidelines. Analysis overwhelms creativity.

Good design researchers are keenly aware of this of course, and seek to provide the appropriate balance for each project, making analysis and inspiration as sparring partners. An unscientific survey of colleagues and blog posts indicates that others are recognizing the issue and working to push the pendulum back the other way to a more balanced position.

Design research is not (just) user research

This brings me to my last point, one where I do have a disagreement with how Don sets up the article: he equates design research with user research.

Design research has many definitions, but within the product cycle, it consists of studies aiming to understand the activities, desires, and needs of the people for whom a product or service is desired. Design researchers use a wide variety of methods, but all of them, whether it be ethnographic observations, systematic probes, or even surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups aim at one thing: to determine those hidden, unspoken needs that will lead to a novel innovation and then to great success in the marketplace.

This is a very typical definition, but one that I reject. Design research can be, and should be, much more than user research. It should include research into technologies, brands, macro trends, retail settings, competitors and comparatives, and a company’s own IP and capabilities. In my book I refer to this as multi-vector research - where we examine multiple vectors of data types simultaneously, and seek insights by finding the patterns across the vectors, not just within a single vector (e.g. user research).

As every design researcher knows, users can be myopic in their expression of needs, and we do everything we can to get at the underlying needs. If we expand our vision to include these other vectors then they can give us a better view into needs and - importantly - opportunities, than going by user needs alone.

Design is not solely about creating products that users want - design, like politics, must balance many requirements. Users are of course a very important stakeholder in those requirements, but designers are tasked with also working with the requirements of engineering, manufacturing, brand, technologies, costs, etc. Likewise, design research does itself a disservice if it only looks at user needs - its scope needs to match that of design itself.

Related articles

Don Norman’s article

Steve Portigal response

Buy this book: Designing for the Digital Age

click to enlargeMy colleague Celine Pering just picked up this book by Kim Goodwin of Cooper, and it’s a stunner. A real tome at 700+ pages, it covers a huge swath of the design research and development process for complex digital products, with an unsurprising emphasis on Cooper’s persona process. It’s well organized, with a nice balance of theory and practical advice, and highly visual. For a comprehensive hands-on guide with lots of examples, this is the best I’ve yet seen. Kudos to Kim, this must have been a big undertaking.

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