Delivering differentiated services that lead to remarkable experiences requires a thorough understanding of your customers. While this is a highly complex task that requires an analysis from different perspectives some patterns can help to identify these potential areas. The following is such a pattern that can be used to better understand the roles of your customers.

The initial question is: Who is your customer?. This is not always obvious since there are many actors involved in the purchase and use of a certain product or service. Yet five main roles can be identified that exist in many purchasing situations. Often several, sometimes all of these roles might be conducted by the same individual but recognizing the needs and requirements of each separately leads to potential areas for service design.

The following figure shows the most common roles that customers represent.

Here is a short description of the single roles:

• Initiator: The individual who initiates the search for a solution to the customer’s problem.
• Influencer: Individuals who have some influence on the purchase decision.
• Decider: Taking into consideration the views of the initiator and influencer some individual will make the decision as to which product or service should be purchased.
• Purchaser: The individual who is actually paying for the product or service
• User: The individual who finally consumes the product or service

It is important to understand that in any buying situation various actors can and will influence the buying decision and they will also be – either active or passive – experiencing a product and service and should therefore be considered when designing the overall “brand experience”. If different individuals undertake these roles, it is necessary to develop individual and differentiated services to satisfy the different needs and requirements.

The standard example for this is a visit to a theme park with children. The initiator might be the child that saw an advertising on TV, while the decider and purchaser are the parents. While it is important to design a great experience for children at a theme park, it might be even more important to focus on the experience of parents because ultimately they will decide and pay for the next trip to Disneyland.

The different roles become even more apparent in a business-to-business context. One classic example is the Hilti Fleet Management. Hilti offers differentiated services for the purchaser of the drilling machines and does not focus solely on the user of the drilling machines.

We’ll manage your tools so you can manage your business.
For a fixed monthly fee, Hilti provides you with a new fleet of tools.
During the usage time, there is only one monthly invoice for all your tools that covers absolutely all costs (including repair). Plus — at the end of the usage period — your fleet will be renewed with the latest generation of Hilti tools. Based on your needs, you select the type and quantity of tools.

Your benefits from Hilti Tool Fleet Management:
Full transparency & reliability

• Instant access to your complete tool inventory
• Easy accounting and cost allocation
• All tools labeled with your company logo plus inventory code / job reference possible.
• Exclusive Internet portal to track your tool fleet, order tools and consumables and arrange tool repair pick-ups

Applying this simple pattern can help identify areas for innovative products and services which in the end contribute to a remarkable customer experience.

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User centered design is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Various methods and tools are used within organizations to improve the understanding of user and task requirements, support the iteration of design and evaluation. Identifying the most important and most used user centered design methods was the goal of the study “The State of User Centered Design Practice”.

In this study the authors surveyed more than 100 experienced practitioners of UCD with at least three years of experience and who considered UCD as their primary job. The following table shows the key results of the survey (Ranging from 1 to 5, from the most important to the least important method):

The following links provide more information about the individual user centered design practices, collected from various sources.

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs (by User Interface Engineering)

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Requirements Analysis – Characteristics of Good Requirements (by The University of Queensland)

Requirements analysis is a tool that can be used to ensure that designers capture all the whole-of-life needs of the product or system from the perspectives of all the stakeholders - the acquirer, the operator, the user, the maintainer and those who refurbish or dispose of the it at the end of it life. At the end of the process, the designers are left with a document listing the system requirements for a product design. From this document they can base much of their subsequent work.

Iterative User Interface Design (by Jacob Nielsen)

Redesigning user interfaces on the basis of user testing can substantially improve usability. In four case studies, the median improvement in overall usability was 165% from the first to the last iteration, and the median improvement per iteration was 38%. Iterating through at least three versions of the interface is recommended, since some usability measures often decrease in some versions if the usability engineering process has focused on improving other parameters.

Usability Evaluation (by Jean Scholtz, National Institute of Standards and Technology)

User-centered evaluations are accomplished by identifying representative users, representative tasks, and
developing a procedure for capturing the problems that users have in trying to apply a particular software
product in accomplishing these tasks. During the design/testing/development cycle of software
development, two types of user evaluations are carried out.

Task analysis methods (by UsabilityNet.org)

Task analysis analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task. A detailed task analysis can be conducted to understand the current system and the information flows within it. These information flows are important to the maintenance of the existing system and must be incorporated or substituted in any new system. Task analysis makes it possible to design and allocate tasks appropriately within the new system. The functions to be included within the system and the user interface can then be accurately specified.

Using Focus Groups for Evaluation (by The University of Arizona)

Focus groups were originally called “focused interviews” or “group depth interviews”. The technique was developed after World War II to evaluate audience response to radio programs (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990). Since then social scientists and program evaluators have found focus groups to be useful in understanding how or why people hold certain beliefs about a topic or program of interest.

A focus group could be defined as a group of interacting individuals having some common interest or characteristics, brought together by a moderator, who uses the group and its interaction as a way to gain information about a specific or focused issue.

Heuristic Evaluation (by Usability Body of Knowledge)

A usability evaluation method in which one or more reviewers, preferably experts, compare a software, documentation, or hardware product to a list of design principles (commonly referred to as heuristics) and list where the product does not follow those principles.

Interviews (by UsabilityNet.org)

The interview is a method for discovering facts and opinions held by potential users of the system being designed. It is usually done by one interviewer speaking to one informant at a time. Reports of interviews have to be carefully analyzed and targeted to ensure they make their impact. Otherwise the effort is wasted.

Using Prototypes (by SAP Design Guild)

Prototypes can help to evaluate design alternatives at any stage of the development process. Here three approaches are introduced: storyboards, paper prototyping, and HTML prototyping. A listing of pros and cons is given for the prototyping approaches in order to facilitate the decision of which is best for your requirements.

User survey for design (by UsabilityNet.org)

User surveys are a means of finding out how the software or web site is likely to be used by a specific set of users, and who these users are likely to be. The answers user surveys provide must be relevant to the issues that are important to the design team. User surveys are traditionally carried out by post, but increasingly, the Internet is used for this purpose.

Expert reviews (by Cognitis)

Expert reviews are an opportunity for the design team to obtain the perspectives of designers who have been outside the development process. There is probably no single more cost-effective way to improve the quality of a product.

Perform Card Sorting (by Usability.gov)

Card sorting is a way to involve users in grouping information for a Web site. Participants in a card sorting session are asked to organize the content from your Web site in a way that makes sense to them. Participants review items from your Web site and then group these items into categories. Participants may even help you label these groups.

What is a Participatory Design workshop? (by Information & Design)

A Participatory Design (PD) workshop is one in which developers, business representatives and users work together to design a solution. PD workshops give users a voice in the design process, thus increasing the probability of a usable design.

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Opinions on the degree of required formalization for innovation processes vary widely. While one group argues that innovation can not be engineered because it is the outcome of a creative processes others belief that it is possible to set-up highly formalized processes that lead to innovative products and services. No matter what group one belongs to, it is reasonable to use well-established methods and tools that support in innovation development.

“Market research methods for innovation development” is a paper written by Dennis List from the University of South Australia which looks at the variety of established and emerging market research methods for researching innovations. The methods are grouped into (1) understanding customers, (2) idea generation, (3) concept testing and (4) estimating market size, growth and composition. The methods for each group are:

Understanding customers

• Empathic Design
• Observation
• Customer visits
• Ethnography
• Alien interviewing
• ZMET (Metaphor Elicitation)
• Codiscovery conference
• Information acceleration

Generating Ideas

• Brainstorming and synectics
• Templates of product change
• Morphological analysis
• TRIZ
• Nominal group technique (NGT)
• Scenario planning
• Lead users
• Secondary research
• Lateral Thinking
• Ignoring customers

Concept Testing

• Storyboarding
• Customer Idealized Design
• Charrette
• Usability testing
• Consumer clinics
• A-B testing (formal experiments)
• Consensus groups
• House of Quality / QFD

Estimating market size, growth and composition

• Test marketing
• Delphi method
• Expeditionary marketing
• Tracking surveys
• Simulation
• Forecasting
• Monitoring, response techniques

Each of the methods is explained briefly and limitations are discussed. Most important the article provides further references for each of the methods.

Download the full paper.

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