Chapter 1
Introduction
User research is the process of figuring out how people interpret and use products and services. It is used everywhere from websites, to mobile phones, to consumer electronics, to medical equipment, to banking services, and beyond. Interviews, usability evaluations, surveys, and other forms of user research conducted before and during design can make the difference between a product or service that is useful, usable, and successful and one that’s an unprofitable exercise in frustration for everyone involved. After a product hits the market, user research is a good way to figure out how to improve it, to build something new—or to transform the market altogether.
It may seem obvious that companies should ensure that people will use their products or services. But even industry giants can lose sight of this common-sense proposition. In a cross-industry study of 630 U.S. and UK executives by the consulting firm Accenture, 57% of the executives reported that “inability to meet customer needs” had resulted in failures of new products or services. Fifty percent further blamed the “lack of a new or unique customer-perceived value proposition.”
As these executives learned the hard way, being first to market with a new product or service isn’t enough. Companies need products that people desire, that fulfill human needs, and that people can actually use. After a product or service fails, getting a company back on track can take significant effort to reconnect with one’s audience and integrate those understandings back into standard business processes. That means user research, as the iconic Danish toymaker LEGO discovered.
Learning from LEGO
In the 1980s and 1990s, the LEGO Group expanded in all directions. It introduced products, such as computer games, action figures, and television shows, that veered away from its famous core business of pop-together plastic pieces. It opened amusement parks and licensed its name to other companies. And it encouraged unfettered creativity in designer teams. One result was the futuristic restyling of its classic flagship, the LEGO City product line, and the creation of many complex new lines with specialized pieces.
Yet by the early 2000s, the LEGO Group was struggling. Recessions in major markets had hurt overall sales. It also didn’t help that competitors had taken advantage of the LEGO Group’s recently expired patents. But one of the company’s biggest problems was that kids simply didn’t like the new designs. Notably, some redesigned lines had crashed more than others. The City product line, for example, had generated about 13% of the company’s entire revenue in 1999. Only a few years later, it accounted for only 3%. The line’s profitability had “literally almost evaporated,” an executive vice-president told business reporter Jay Greene. At the same time, manufacturing costs had skyrocketed. Instead of doing more with the components they already had, the new product lines had multiplied the number of expensive new components. With sales down and production costs up, the company was hemorrhaging money. The LEGO Group was losing almost $1 million every day. It was more than a crisis; it looked like a death knell for a beloved institution.
In 2004, a new CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, took a “back to basics” approach. He abandoned some of the new products—the amusement parks in particular—and returned to the core product: the plastic brick. Further, he demanded that designers cut the number of specialized components. But he also directed the company to pay more attention to its core constituency: kids. Knudstorp told Businessweek, “At first I actually said, let’s not talk about strategy, let’s talk about an action plan, to address the debt, to get the cash flow. But after that we did spend a lot of time on strategy, finding out what is LEGO’s true identity. Things like, why do you exist? What makes you unique?”
To find out what made LEGO unique, Knudstorp turned to user research. Over the course of a year, LEGO sent user researchers—who they called “anthros”—to observe families around the world. These anthros focused on culture: the meanings that kids found in favorite possessions; how, where, and why they played; and differences in parenting and play styles across the regions where LEGO did most of its business: Asia, Europe, and the United States. They went to kids’ homes and interviewed them, and then watched them play—not just with LEGO products, but with all kinds of objects.
Through its research, LEGO arrived at a renewed understanding of the meaning of play to children. Insights from the anthros’ visits had emphasized the way that toys fit into kids’ storytelling. Fire trucks didn’t need to look outlandishly cool to be loved; they needed to fit into kids’ existing stories about firefighters. Research also led to an enhanced appreciation of cultural differences in play. Japanese families, for example, tended to strictly separate education and play; selling LEGO products as “educational” blurred that difference for parents, making them unsuitable either as toys or as teaching devices. Boys in the United States, by contrast, were highly supervised most of the time. For them, playing with LEGO bricks was one of the few parent-approved activities that allowed unstructured time alone.
Most importantly, the LEGO design team re-evaluated the importance of difficulty. “You could say,” wrote Businessweek reporter Brad Wieners, “a worn-out sneaker saved LEGO.” In the early 2000s, the company had attributed its failures partially to the popularity of electronic games. But what did kids see in these games? For years, the company had believed that kids wanted a “plug and play” experience: easier roads to speedy success. So they simplified their models. The anthros came back from time spent with kids telling a different story.
The head of LEGO Concept Lab told Businessweek, “We asked an 11-year-old German boy, ‘What is your favorite possession?’ And he pointed to his shoes. But it wasn’t the brand of shoe that made them special. When we asked him why these were so important to him, he showed us how they were worn on the side and bottom, and explained that his friends could tell from how they were worn down that he had mastered a certain style of skateboarding, even a specific trick.” The boys they had met, like the German skater, were interested in experiences of “mastery”: learning skills and, as with the worn-down sneaker, demonstrating that mastery to others. Through observing kids play and talking to them about their lives, LEGO designers realized that they had misunderstood what computer games meant.
In response, the designers went back to the drawing board. While obeying the mandate to reduce the number of different pieces, designers also worked with researchers to support experiences of mastery. Models might use fewer specialized components, but they could still be satisfyingly challenging. Instead of aiming for immediate gratification, the LEGO designers drew from notions of progression built into computer games: winning points, leveling up, and entering rankings. Designers also completely reworked their LEGO City line. Out with the futuristic styling, in with fire trucks that looked like, well, fire trucks.
But that’s not the whole story, though it’s a big part. At the same time, LEGO also turned its attention to a large group of devoted customers who hadn’t strayed: adults. Each individual adult enthusiast spent far more on LEGO products in a year than most kids would ever spend in a lifetime. However, the company’s revenue overall overwhelmingly came from kids—boys ages 7 to 12, to be exact. So most LEGO execs didn’t see any reason to cultivate older customers (not to mention girls, but that’s a different story). In fact, the company had notoriously kept adult fans at arms-length. Communicating with older fans could inspire new product ideas…and then invite lawsuits over the profits from those ideas. But the problem with adult fans for LEGO management wasn’t just lawsuits. “The impression,” Jake McKee, a former LEGO Group community manager, bluntly told a conference audience in 2009, “was that these guys are weird.”
“And yes,” McKee continued, “some of them were weird.” But their exuberant love for LEGO kits, he pointed out, was bringing the struggling company a lot of positive attention. On their own initiative, adult fans built massive LEGO installations in shopping malls, attracting attention from tens of thousands of kids. Their efforts brought them stories on television and in newspapers. And on the Internet, grown-up, big-spending fans had built a thriving ecosystem of fan forums and marketplaces.
At first, the websites had taken the company aback. Tormod Askildsen, Head of Community Development at LEGO, told Ericsson Business Review, at first, “we didn’t really like it and we were a bit concerned.” McKee and other members of LEGO’s community relations group decided to change that attitude. McKee and his group started by meeting adult fans where they were most comfortable: on online forums, at meetings, even at bars. They started with no budget and no permission, doing “the smallest thing we could get away with.” Over time, they built a pilot program, developing long-term relationships with a few “LEGO Ambassadors” as eyes into the adult fan community. By 2005, they had come far enough to post requests for product suggestions on popular fan websites. In 2009, Askildsen said, “People from my team communicate with this group more or less on a daily basis, discussing different themes, ideas or to brainstorm.” In the end, LEGO even hired adult fans as designers.
While championing a “back to basics” approach for kids, LEGO managers had learned enough from the adult fan community to add special products for them. First came the $500 Star Wars Millennium Falcon kit, which became extremely popular. In 2006, the company added the Modular Buildings line, a set of complex kits with sophisticated architectural details. Most importantly, LEGO began to take their adult fans seriously as a source of ideas and inspiration. “They realized they could use adults to influence kid fans, and kids to excite adult fans,” said McKee. Today, the company even launches entirely fan-designed lines.
Besides controlling manufacturing costs, this strategy turned sales around. After the redesign, LEGO the City line was responsible for 20% of the company’s revenue in 2008—regaining its original place and even exceeding it. The executive vice-president told Greene, “It has refound its identity.” Between 2006 and 2010, company revenue increased 105%, growing even in downturns. “The fourth quarter of 2008 was a horror show for most companies,” an industry analyst told Time magazine. “And LEGO sailed through like it was no problem.” Revenue continued to grow in 2009 and 2010. In 2011, LEGO made $1 billion in the United States for the first time ever.
As the LEGO Group thrived, so did its commitment to user research. As well as integrating desk research, field visits, and expert interviews into their idea generation process for existing lines, the company sent out the anthros again for another project—this time, to develop new products for an audience the company had long ignored: girls.
By carefully observing and engaging with its users, the LEGO Group discovered ways to overcome its most daunting problems. User research showed the company how to redesign its products to delight its core audience of kids; how to build strong relationships with adult fans and make use of those relationships in marketing and product development; and how to control production costs even as it introduced new products. The most expert toymaker or management consultant in the world could not have told LEGO designers how to do these things. They had to learn it from their customers.
LEGO Lessons
The problems you and your company need to address might not be as all-encompassing as those faced by the LEGO Group, but the toymaker’s story includes some important lessons for user experience research that we want to emphasize. The obvious lesson, of course, is that knowing your customers is important, and that it takes work! That shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s gotten this far into this book. But there are other, less obvious, points.
Don’t Take Your Core Audience for Granted
Neither the LEGO Group’s storied reputation as a children’s toymaker nor a knowledge of child development theory could guarantee success with kids. Instead, the company had to re-engage with kids directly in order to revitalize its design strategy.
Look Beyond Your Mainstream or “Average” Users
The company gained inspiration from adult fans’ creativity and enthusiasm. Moreover, they found new profits when they designed for the specific tastes of their adult fans, an audience they had previously ignored.
Research and Design Innovation Are Perfectly Compatible
There are some persistent myths about user research: that it stifles creativity; that it’s only good for incremental improvements; that real advances only happen when technical innovation drives product development. In the case of the LEGO Group, none of that was true. After an investment into user research and outreach, LEGO didn’t stop making new products—in fact, it continues to launch new “brick” product lines and new digital products based on research. The toymaker just systematically, and strategically, redirected its design efforts.
Research Insights Are Most Transformative When They Are Constructive
According to business reporter Brad Wieners, the company’s research “shattered many of the assumptions” it had about kids’ desire for easy success—but also replaced it with a new paradigm, that of “mastery.” Instead of leaving their corporate clients empty-handed, the anthros introduced a new model of play to replace the one they discredited.
User Research Can Have Systemic Consequences
As Wieners writes, “So while it didn’t take a genius or months of research to realize it might be a good idea to bring back the police station or fire engine that are at the heart of LEGO’s most popular product line (LEGO City), the ‘anthros’ informed how the hook-and-ladder or motorcycle cop should be designed, packaged, and rolled out.” Then, to make sure that they stayed connected to their customers, the company integrated early user research into their Innovation Model, a company-wide sequence of activities guiding new product development. User research typically drives nuts and bolts decisions about the object being made. But you get the most value from user research when all parts of the company take part in interpreting it, so that it impacts not just the design of the product, but also the design of the business itself.
And finally:
Research Needs Supporters
LEGO management didn’t just send out researchers once; they integrated research activities into everyday business processes. The fate of research insights isn’t under the control of researchers; it takes collaborative relationships across companies, and support from management, to influence product development.
In Conclusion
This book is about the knowledge that will help you create and sustain great product and service experiences. It will help you avoid situations like that faced by the LEGO Group while retaining and cultivating the creativity that leads to innovative, exciting, unique, and profitable products and services. It provides a collection of user experience research tools to help you explore how products and services can engage with people’s desires and abilities.
Our philosophy is not about following strict procedures to predictable solutions. It’s about defining (and redefining) specific problems and opportunities—and then creatively responding to them. The ultimate goal of these tools is not merely to make people happy; it’s to make successful products and services by making people happy. With a set of tools to help figure out how people view the world, you are much more likely to create things that help people solve problems they really care about, in ways that delight and gratify them.