Ask HN: What if the customer does not know what they want? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What if the customer does not know what they want?

8 pointsAyouby13 comments

When coming up with a new product or business idea, you can:

1. Solve a problem: "I hate getting into my car during winter because it's too cold" - Remote start 2. Improve upon existing products: - Our phone is now 20% faster 3. Trends and market analysis: "Renewables are getting a lot of investment and attention" - Green energy focused product. 4. Customer feedback: "I wish the band on my watch wasn't so itchy" - New watch band material

The list goes on.

What about when you can't rely on customers input because they can't envision what it is you want to do? Sometimes, the customer does not know if they even want it. So when doing user interviews you'll get the yes man answer, based on irrelevant data. For example, adding touch-id to iPhones, if you go around asking people do you want a fingerprint scanner on your phone, they would have looked at you funny at the time.

Often times you'll hear don't create a solution, then look for the target audience. But to what extent?

What are your thoughts?

Startup School has a great video on this topic:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users

> The second mistake that we pretty much all make is we talk about hypotheticals. We talk about what our product could be. We talk about features that we want to build. We ask questions like, "If we built this feature, would you be interested in using it? Or would you be interested in paying for it?" That is wrong. Instead, talk about specifics that have already occurred in the user's life. This will give you stronger and better information in which to make product and company changing decisions. You also want to talk in general about the user's life. You don't want to just talk about the specific problem or, sorry, the specific solution that you're presenting.

> Try to extract information about the users, the path that led them to encounter that problem. Ask them questions about their life in more broader ways to extract context around how they arrived at this problem. Learn about their motivations. Learn about why they got themselves into that problem in the first place.

> The first question is, "What is the hardest part about doing the thing that you're trying to solve?"

> The second question …, "Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem."

> The third question is, "Why was this hard?"

> The fourth question is, "What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?"

I think the general idea is to look for what is now called "pain points". These are basically the friction points in a process - the parts that cost a lot of time, effort, money, or the parts that have a higher likelihood than the rest of the process to fail. You then either try to make these parts of the process better, or reengineer the process to eliminate these parts.

For your example of Touch ID: The way to figure out that this is a product people would want by the interview process is not to ask them about a fingerprint scanner, but to identify logging in to a phone as a "pain point". This particular use case of touch ID existed long before smartphones. It's just that smartphones were the first mass-deployed login device that are used sporadically but frequently during the day in order to justify the deployment of it. While fingerprint login was also used in laptop computers before smartphones, the lack of touch ID doesn't cause as much friction because people log in to their laptops less frequently than a phone, and because a laptop comes with a much easier to use keyboard than even a phone's login screen. Plus you've got the cachet of iPhones, and the universal implementation of features that Apple brings to its devices. How many iPhone users really cared about touch ID? I don't know. Fewer than their are/were people with touch ID enabled iPhones though. Which wouldn't be the case if Apple had made it an optional purchase.

P.S. I hate the term "pain point", but it's what's used these days.

This seems like the right approach. Instead of asking customers "what they want", ask them "what they hate" and then design an innovative solution addressing that.

Job's answer to that was something like: "People don't know what they want. You have to show them". Job's used spectacles to show people. He had to rely on his own personal vision of the future to get the right idea. What spectacle you use I don't know. You have to find it just like you have to find the idea yourself. That is your goal. Find a suitable "spectacle". Of course I'm using "spectacle" in the loosest possible manner. Generalize and explore the idea of "spectacle".

Good luck!

I can't think of another person this past century who would match Steve Jobs's vision. He was one of those rare persons with an ability to identify opportunities. But you also have to remember that Steve was no engineer. He was the visionary and surrounded himself with those who would buy into his vision and deliver. It all started with Steve and Woz, then grew from there.

Most people forget that Steve was an aesthetic, learnt calligraphy and spent time in communes in India. He was the primary customer for every new Apple product. That is, he was scratching his own itch. He was infamous for calling work in progress SH*T which enticed staff to stretch their abilities and accomplish the impossible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi

He took Nintendo from a playing card company to an international juggernaut who owns the biggest IPs.

He also never used to play games. He would greenlight games by having an employee play the game in front of him. Somehow he had a keen eye for game quality, since the Nintendo Seal of Quality was a big factor in the resurgence of the home console.

He was also a difficult person to deal with.

You're just repeating the myth of Steve Jobs. Taking a course in calligraphy doesn't mean anything.

Interesting how you focus on the one single detail which doesn't immediately contribute to the point being made.

Buckminster Fuller was both inventor and visionary. Which is probably a big reason his visions weren't fulfilling to the broader society.

What about Walt Disney?

Yes, but the spectacle is half the story. It only works if people say “wow, I nad never thought about it, but that’s a huge problem I face daily and would love to solve.”

Everyone knows you can’t travel 5,000 miles in a day. So it’s not a top of mind problem. We relegate it to the same space as not being able to breathe underwater or having to go somewhere to find and buy/borrow a physical book. But once the possibility of getting on a plane or downloading an ebook is presented, suddenly it’s an amazing solution to a problem we didn’t know we had.

Jobs was an amazing showman, and he certainly pitched some terrible ideas, but his successes were genuine solutions, with the spectacle being an accelerant.

what customers say is not important. focus on what they do and observe them.

customers do not know if they will like something. they can only tell you whether they want to buy it or not, when you built it and present it to them.

That's the case in general...requirements gathering, part of consulting, is big business

Error

Reply on news.ycombinator.com