Customer visits

You can't ask customers what they want your product to do because they're not engineers or designers; even if they are, their focus isn't your product. But talking with them uncovers information that helps us plan product strategy. It also helps us create personas, models of users and their needs.

We visit customers at home or at work to see what the environment is like, what their interruptions are like, how they really collaborate with others and what they really do with a product. This is one aspect of customer research.

Recent discoveries

Recent customer visits have been very helpful. Here are some things we saw:

People using one product didn't understand the getting-started process and missed out on a number of opportunities that would have been helpful to them.

We also saw a couple of high-end users doing things outside the product to achieve their goals instead of using product features.

In another product, we learned that a feature we were planning wouldn't be useful. Just a couple of interviews saved a lot of design and development costs.

Don't make design decisions in a vacuum. Let's talk about talking with your customers to see how to best design your product.

Seeing the user's environment is important

Visiting people is very different from asking them to come see us in a usability study:

Perhaps the most important thing is that it's easier for them to work with their own data, whether it's online or in print.

They don't have to travel to talk with us.

We can see what their distractions are and how they handle them.