User Experience, Not User Needs Drives Real Value

Many people understand the value of identifying user needs, but this is really not the core value of what a customer research team (like mine) provides. In this entry, I'd like to explain the difference between user needs and the user experience design work we undertake at Ricoh Innovations.

The advanced customer research team that conducts in-situ customer research and prototype development/iteration at Ricoh Innovations was founded in 2003 with the goal of identifying the hidden customer needs that users cannot themselves articulate. Via this definition, user needs are split into two distinct groups:

1) needs of which the user is aware and communicates via suggestions, complaints or a service call and,

2) needs of which the user is unaware and therefore unable to communicate. Let's call this latter type of need "hidden needs". Ricoh's vast network of direct and indirect sales/support channels respond to suggestions, complaints and service calls (type 1 needs). ABC focuses on the second category of needs - hidden needs, some prominent types being:

• Needs that exist among a workgroup of users- with no one user having enough knowledge of the entire workflow to articulate or suggest possible solutions to the issues

• Needs that occur due to a lack of a simple, approachable technological solution within the customer's budget- a good example being the drudgery of re-typing information into a computer system (even though expensive systems are available to solve this issue)

• Needs that remain unsolved (even though approachable solutions exist) because the current solution is simply too difficult to discover, learn and apply for the average user (without dedicated IT help). Anyone who has tried to print when they do not have access to a network or the correct printing driver knows this type of need well.

Counter Intuitive: Identifying Hidden Unmet User Needs is Not Enough

You might ask: If one can identify these broad categories of hidden unmet needs, and provide explicit examples, isn't the job done? One might think so, but the truth is counter intuitive. Simply knowing about a problem is very different than knowing how to solve it. Our efforts have shown that reporting hidden needs to product planners is not very helpful to them. Product planners need to understand the hidden needs, but they also need to know what type of solutions the customer finds most valuable. Experience design research is the official term for this type of research.

Wikipedia defines "Experience Design as the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experiencefunctionality of the design.^[1] An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking. ABC is on the forefront of this growing field and continues to improve effective transfer techniques so that valuable user experiences are available to product planners to encapsulate in the software, hardware and services that make them real. and culturally relevant solutions, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving

The Key Value is Experience Design

My team pioneered a rapid research process that quickly finds hidden user needs through on-site ethnographic research at customer sites. By presenting users, managers and other stakeholders (IT, etc.) with the specifics of how their work is currently done, our clients are able to imagine better ways to: work together, brainstorm things that would add tremendous value to their work, and ultimately, add value to their end customers. Our role in this process is to facilitate discussion, capture ideas and infuse promising ideas with our extensive knowledge of current technology breakthroughs, market trends and work best practice.

With our client's ideas in hand, you might think we'd end our research and report what we've learned, but we don't. We've learned through experience that what people think and say is not usually what they do or ultimately need. If we stopped here, the rest of Ricoh may very well spend millions of dollars building the wrong products and solutions. So, we push on, and quickly cobble together a very rough prototype of the concept they think they need and ask them to test it for a few weeks. Even though what we deploy is usually bulky and slow and certainly nowhere near how a commercial version would be architected, these things do not matter. The customer is enthusiastic to test "their" idea, and so they give it a try, and together we learn what they really need.

Put simply, our customers are smart people and can be considered "domain experts" at their work. They are not, however, skilled technologist, designers or engineers and thus usually do not know the scope or depth of what solutions are possible. They start with a limited understanding of their issue, and a limited understanding of the solution possibilities. Our job is to expand both their knowledge of the need and the possible solution directions. Together, we find the best overall user experience and , more importantly, identify why and how to quantify its value. Once we understand the user's needs, have a tested and accepted design, as well as data on its qualitative and quantitative value to the customer, do we pass on what we've learned. For this reason, we stay on a research theme for a few years, learning how a successful design is valuable to our customers in different industries and work group sizes.

Our past clients report that this eye-opening process is where they find real value from our work. The understanding and new ideas that come out of our conversations provide them with insight required to improve their business. We believe this is why they many want to work with us again, and recommend other potential candidates.

We Live in Exponential Times: Innovations Enabled by Technology

User Experience as Design Guide and Strategic Weapon

Many companies dislike and try to avoid unpredictability, yet our world today is undergoing tremendous change at an accelerating pace. Making accurate prediction is almost impossible so many companies try to insulate themselves from change by carefully pursuing business models resistant to economic cycles, competitive shifts and consumer fades. Ricoh is quite adept at insulating itself from change. Fourteen straight years of profitability in our core MFP business testify to this fact.

As social, economic and technological landscapes grow more intertwined and complex, there will come a point when resistance to unexpected change will no longer be a viable strategy. At some point, just like the rice in the field, Ricoh will need to flexibly adapt, instead of resist change in order to succeed. Such flexibility will come in many forms including: flexible design process to adapt to new insights and desired user experiences, flexible development process to adapt to new technological opportunities and flexible, transparent decision-making processes to keep us competitive in new market realities.

Ricoh executives are already well-aware of the need to embrace change, and have undertaken a series of important steps to improve our: knowledge of our customers, flexibility in our development process and adaptive marketing processes. Our dream here at Ricoh Innovations is to support Ricoh in creating a customer-focused approach to the implementation and marketing stages of product development that preserves on user needs and desires that we've uncovered and confirmed in customer research.


A Great Opportunity: Dramatically Improve the Print Experience

From our direct interactions with customers, we know printer manufacturers are sitting at the crux of a fundamental shift in how businesses engage with their customers. A major shift that is occurring in North America is the shift towards integrated solutions from standalone products and services. Consumers and corporate buyers more and more are expecting solutions to work smoothly out of the box. For example, American workers don't desire printers. They don't go to work to print; they print to work. When their work requires printing, they want printing solutions that make it easy and efficient to get their work done.

Customers cannot understand why they can physically see a Ricoh printer, but not be able to print to it. They can see it, they select the "print" from their application and nothing happens...They have no idea that the proper printer driver is required, and that it must be properly configured and that they must be on a network (or directly tethered to the device) and they have no, and I mean absolutely zero, interest in learning. Thus, from a user experience perspective, the entire printing industry has failed them. Somehow they can easily stream music to their MP3 Player or phone, but they still can't print.

I see this user need as a big opportunity. It is a bounded problem for which a printer company controls most of the major components. We can improve the experience of printing dramatically, but it will require a subtle but important shift in our thinking as a company. We can no longer think about what we produce as a product. We must consider it a solution in and of itself. That's right, by itself. "But isn't that simply a product," you ask? A printer, to be more precise? My answer is "No". We may market our printers as "solutions" but to customers, they are not easy enough to use to meet their criteria of a "solution".

Currently MFPs (multi-function printer/copiers) and printers are pieces of hardware that require software to be separately installed and configured to make them work. They are not a solution out of the box. To customers they are not intuitive and easy enough to use, in accord with the user experience customers highly desire. The user experience that our customers desire is one of simple elegance. They want to plug in our device, and have the device make a friendly sound while it "wakes up" and automatically explores its new environment. They want our device to communicate that it will spend the next few minutes introducing itself to the network, and other networked devices to better understand how it can support work in this particular office. As part of this "start up process", its display will which ask which way it should introduce itself to the users - via a personalized email, with a link to the software (residing on our device) which will be automatically installed on the user's PC, or would it be easier for everyone if it just pinged everyone's machine with a pop up message on the deskbar?

Whichever option that is chosen, the user experience must remain elegant and simple. To the user, it should feel like a polite new person has just introduced himself and is immediately adding value by increasing the ease of printing. Users expect that the setup procedure will be minimally intrusive. The print capability should be installed automatically (as a background process) and should re-appear only to point out that the new solution is both more efficient and eco-friendly and should it make itself the default?


Solution Design Goal: Make it Elegant and Simple (1-2-3 Simple)

The design experience just explained is by no means impossible, but it does require a relentless focus on the user's experience and the customer's expectations. In practice it means that everyone involved in commercializing a solution must be committed to driving the product plans based on meeting or exceeding the desired user experience. A historical example of the benefits afforded to a company that meets or exceeds its customer expectations can be found in 1888 with George Eastman.

Eastman understood the power of photography, but knew that the current products were simply too difficult for the average consumer. They were also expensive, and clunky. He determined that in order to create a breakthrough product, he'd need a device where "You press the button, and we do the rest". It became his advertising slogan for the original Kodak camera. The camera was an unparalleled success, because of it was so approachable and easy to use. The user simply 1) Pulled the cord (prepared the shutter), 2) Turned the key (advanced the film) and 3) Pressed the button (releasing the shutter). This type of simple 1-2-3, yet elegant design is very powerful.


The Economic Value of Simplicity

Throughout the 20th century businesses largely ignored the lessons from Eastman's experience. In fact, Kodak itself forgot the important of this lesson when its customers wanted the benefits of digital photography and instead of adapting; it tried to protect its massive film business and underfunded digital research and development. We all know what happened, Canon now owns the consumer market which Kodak once dominated. As we move into the 21st century it's becoming clear that we'll need to heed George Eastman's lessons to succeed. Otherwise, our customers will move to the provider of the superior customer experience. Just look at Apple as an example. It failed in the PC race of the 1980's and 1990's against Intel and Microsoft, but is now steadily gaining ground in both the notebook and smartphone markets based on its unrelenting focus on a superior user experience. As PC margins fall, Apple Notebooks margins remain healthy. As mobile phone vendors struggle for margins, the Apple iPhone lands the number 3 spot in the worldwide smartphone market,growing at over 245% this year .

Apple has embraced complexity and transformed it into elegant solutions. In a quote uttered 17 years before the introduction of the iPod or the iPhone, Steve Jobs stated the essence of user experience design:


"When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple,
you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then
you get into the problem, ad you see that its really complicated
and you come up with all sorts of convoluted and difficult solutions.
That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people (companies) stop...
But the really great companies will keep going and find the key, the
underlying principle of the problem--and come up with an elegant and
beautiful solution that works."

Source: Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of the Macintosh, The Computer that Changed Everything (Penguin, 2000) p. 139.)

The lesson we should learn is that those companies that cut through the complexity and offers a truly elegant user experience will be handsomely rewarded with higher volumes, customer loyalty and word of mouth promotion. By staying true to the simple user experiences required by our customers, we can avoid failed products and use technology as a competitive weapon to simplify, instead of complicate our solutions. Anyone interested in improving their approach to user experience would benefit from reading Subject To Change -予測不可能な世界で最高の製品とサービスを作る by Peter Merholz,Brandon Schauer,David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (単行本（ソフトカバー） - 2008/10/27) that discusses ways that Adaptive Path (a design experience firm) have succeeded in driving user experience through the commercialization process at many types of companies.