How do you persuade someone that the information gathered by a marketing organization, while valuable, isn't sufficient to do good user interface design work?
This week I spent some time reading an extensive document of information about our customers gathered by our marketing organization. It is fantastic information and I'm almost drooling as I read through it.
At the same time, I'm also gnashing my teeth, because it doesn't answer some of the questions I have as an interaction designer. This got me thinking about the problems I've had in the past convincing some part of the organization that just because marketing was collecting information, it wasn't the kind of information needed for good UI design. This is not to say there is no overlap, but just that they aren't identical needs either.
In the document I've been reading, there is a lot of information like:
Customer would like feature X
Customer has this-and-such problem with feature Y
Customer wishes Sun would do W with product Q
In general, the information talks about large-scale problems, wishes, needs for features and needs for lack-of-features. Of course, this is a good granularity for marketing, for this allows them to ask for particular things from engineering and then promote those things when they market the product.
Some of these problems aren't really user interface issues at all. Of those that are, I tend to need much more "environmental" kinds of information. What does the user tend to do when they use feature Y? Sometimes there's a mental model conflict involved in the transition. So one of the sytem models needs to be adjusted. Or, if the user wants feature X, where will they need to use it in their workflow? Often I need to know the general attitudes or goals of individuals using the software and that will inform how to design the interaction. This kind of information is often absent from conventional marketing research results.
Perhaps the answer to my first question is to observe that marketing research tends to look at features and how they fit into an overall business need, while user research perhaps looks at features and how they fit into an individual's needs.