Page 86

MASTER OBSERVATION

Observation will influence the way you think about your customers and will help you understand them better. It will inform your point of view and help to validate or invalidate your assumptions. But, like anything, there are right ways and not-so-right ways to observe the world around you.

Think about this: you sit down to a cup of coffee or tea. How would you open your sugar packet? Okay, feel free to read on. We’ll get back to the sugar packet in a moment.

Observation will influence the way you think about your customers and will help you understand them better. Observation will change the way you innovate. But, just like anything, there are right ways and not-so-right ways to observe the world around you.

As you watch your subjects (your potential customers), your goal is to discover their latent needs, desires, and ambitions – the kinds of things they may not even know they need or want. These are often things that people would not be able to tell you they want. Does the runner run just to get fit? Perhaps he is running so that he doesn’t feel guilty eating pizza on the weekends. Watch him for a while and on different occasions, and you just might find out.

BE A FLY ON THE WALL

A good way to think about observation is to act like a fly on the wall, observing people in their natural habitat, finding the key moments in their lives. The decisions your customers make on a daily basis are the important ones. After all, it’s their decisions that lead them not only to do what they do today, but also will affect what they choose to do tomorrow. And, just as a researcher wouldn’t tell a test subject that a placebo is a just a placebo, you also shouldn’t tell your subjects what you are trying to learn from them. Just watch for a while. You want people to act naturally and unconsciously, as if you’re not there.

DON’T GO EMPTY-HANDED

Before you venture out to observe your customers, you’ll need to do a bit of planning. First off, define the subject of your observation before you go. What people and activities or behaviors do you plan to observe? Preselect the environment or location you want to observe. Where will your customers be at different times of the day? This, of course, is critical as people engage in different activities throughout the day. If you’re keen on observing people exercising, for instance, plan to go the park, gym, track, etc., in the morning and evening. Don’t forget to bring materials to record your findings as notes, pictures, sketches, and videos. It would be shame to forget about key moments. Or worse, not be able to share them with your team.

Finally, when you start exploring and observing, leave your point of view and assumptions at the door. Don’t judge, just soak it in. And, the answer to the sugar packet question: you shake it before tearing it open.

Page 87

THINK LIKE A DESIGNER

You can learn to think and work like a designer. It is about switching between different perspectives to find solutions. As a designer, the three most important perspectives are your own perspective, your business’s perspective, and your customer’s or society’s perspective. When my team engages with design jobs, we need to know the customer’s perspective. I want to ensure we are on the same page. Part of that perspective includes an understanding that your customers are investing time, money, and effort to make money. If we don’t share this perspective there is little point to joining each other on a design journey.

Design thinking is more relevant today than it ever has been. Increasingly, it’s becoming more important to design and to be agile, flexible, and adaptable. The world is changing faster and faster. As part of that change, people have more access to information – and share more than ever before. Whereas knowledge used to be the most important quality in business, today, the ability to search for and find opportunities in uncertainty has supplanted knowledge as the most important quality of business people.

Ad van Berlo
Chairman,
VanBerlo Group