Designing Products that Accomplish Goals
Posted by Chris in Interaction Design, User Experience Design
The best products and services don’t merely help people complete tasks, they enable people to accomplish goals. Sometimes the tasks a user performs are in alignment with their goals and often times they are not. Users have a tenacity for doing what it takes to get the job done. In a lot of circumstances, they come up with workarounds and other methods that were never originally designed into the product. Once in a while, they may even change their goals based on a product’s limitations. For example, if their GPS system can’t tell them where to find a “five star” restaurant, they might just settle for it to find them “any” restaurant.
One of the greatest opportunities to improve a product or service lies in between what the user’s tasks are and what their goals are. If you can discover a discrepancy between how the user uses a product or service (the tasks they are performing) and what they really want to accomplish with it (their goal), this can really open up the potential to make innovative changes to your product or service. Many companies that rely solely on market research, as opposed to user research, routinely design their products and services to improve the efficiency of tasks but not necessarily helping the user to accomplish their goal.
A classic example of this is the first generation iPod. There were quite a few mp3 players on the market and some even had video and larger storage capacity. All of these let you click through your songs and play specific songs. The goal of the user, decidedly, being that they wanted to be able to play their mp3 music. But if you ever used one of those pre-iPod mp3 players, you might have remembered your thumb getting tired from all the clicking you had to do as each click painfully moved you one song at a time to the next song. And if you held down the button, it would be just as painful trying to stop remotely close to the song you wanted. When Apple brought the iPod to market, it had fewer features than most of the players already in the market. But what it did do was capitalize on the unmet goals of users who were tired of the one click navigation offered by all of the other players. It would seem that the users of the current mp3 players formulated some new goals based on the limitations of the products they were using. Oh and we shouldn’t forget iTunes, it also allowed users to easily sync their music without having to drag and drop files and folders. It seems so obvious in hind sight.
A lot of Interaction Designers are probably already familiar with this concept. In fact, Cooper has coined the term Goal-Directed® method and is a good place to learn more. Even if you aren’t an Interaction Designer, understanding what your customer’s goals are will help you deliver a much better product or service in the long run.