USERPALOOZA. The moment I knew I’d found my editor...
October last year, I was a walking ’wood for the trees’.
The word-count for USERPALOOZA was 10,000 north of my target, threatening to become a text book or treatise rather than the ‘how-to’ I’d hoped for.
I was so close to the content I didn’t know which of my darlings to kill.
Enter Jude, and her arresting first question;
‘Who’s going to buy it, and why?’
Given the underlying provocation in my work is ‘how well do you know your customer?’ … her seven short words put me on the spot…
…in that moment I knew I’d found my editor.
To answer her perfect question, I described; the type of design research I get so excited about in my consulting work, who my customers were and the encouraging signs I’d seen amongst the types of organisations who hire me;
- How appetite for being customer centred has never been stronger, and organisations have never been more human.
- How design thinking has fuelled demand for greater customer understanding, by rightly emphasising the need to ‘get out of the office’ and into the customers’ lives.
…and some of the less encouraging signs too;
- How I’d seen a kind of ‘honeymoon’ effect, where companies experienced a quick-fire flirt with fieldwork, racing to the horizon in a storm of sticky notes, against the clock, rather than any kind of quality measure.
- How organisations were newly motivated to understand their customer, but some way into their honeymoon with design thinking they realised they were relying on instinct rather than insight.
- How their introduction to design research suited a time-boxed ‘boot camp’ learning experience but speed had come at the cost of depth and rigour.
- How these teams now wished they could loop back, dig deeper or for longer into the lives and worlds of people, markets or contexts.
- How USERPALOOZA is for these teams — who wish to go deeper with design research, to understand their customer in context, to help bring evidence and confidence to their decisions.
Writing for this audience echoed my coaching approach — helping companies connect with their own customers. I’d seen which parts they grokked and which they struggled with, then shaped the content of the book around these. As a result, USERPALOOZA covers initial planning and in-field activity with more detail than later analysis and synthesis.
This follows my experience — that a team who ‘sweats the details’ early is more likely to do the analysis justice, communicate and stand by their findings, because they’ve invested, and believe in the way the data was collected.
There’s another audience, too. I hope this book might help my contemporaries who are increasingly including their colleagues — usually research rookies — in fieldwork studies. I hope Userpalooza works as a pre-flight briefing and in-flight reference, helping them learn what to expect, to understand the rationale behind the planning and mindset they’ll need to take into the field.
If either of these sounds like you, sign up to be notified when USERPALOOZA ships.
(In a few weeks …about how long it will be until I find out exactly how well I know my own customer).
