Wednesday August 10, 2005

Non-YAMB Wednesday

Today's the day: Experience Architecture at Harvard. Exciting stuff. Given that, I'm officially declaring this a "Non-YAMB Wednesday." (Why not. After all, "worst moniker ever made for a Wednesday dot com" wasn't available at NetSol.)

We'll get to YAMB in a moment. Here's where our connection begins: today Smart Money recommends Whole Foods stock, specifically because they're more than just a supermarket:

"The main reason people shop at Whole Foods, and are willing to pay more for the experience, is that it's fun. When you think about it, the Whole Foods concept is pretty revolutionary. It's reinventing food retailing, and might change agriculture...Wall Street analysts tend to think of it as a supermarket chain, which is myopic. Whole Foods is competing not just with the old-line supermarkets, but also with restaurants, catering businesses, coffee bars and chains like Starbucks, wine and beverage retailers, and even cosmetics sellers. Whole Foods is becoming what the department store was in its heyday — a destination, a meeting place, a community center, a town square."

I agree with the assessment of WF, and I'm immediately led to think about how they got where they are (they had a vision that they're realizing on most levels in their organization). Or perhaps more importantly how they didn't get where they are. And it wasn't by relying on surveys to drive "voice-of-customer" data.

Come again? Well if you sat down with most very smart, able-minded people what their "ideal" grocery store would be like, most of the time they'd recommend what should go in the aisles and exactly how those aisles should be laid out. And voila, you'd have a nice assembly-line supermarket in the end, fancy logo and all.

If you ran a survey past potential customers querying them on what they want, the results might be high on things like "organic milk" and "friendly staff" and again, you'd wind up with a shiny, factory-made grocery store, ready to go.

You would get a Yet Another Myopic Business (YAMB). You wouldn't get a revolutionary place like Whole Foods. Somewhere in Texas a very bright person had an idea and they were armed with deep knowledge of what turns customers on -- much deeper than anything generated by most surveys, which work on the assumption that most people can adequately articulate what they want, what they'd need and what they're willing to pay for.

Just like focus groups or any other feedback tool, surveys have their place and can be useful for certain things. But far too often they're relied upon as a tool by you, me, our peers and coworkers for creating vision and driving requirements...which can only lead to YAMB.

Stop. Just stop. Take a breather and ask yourself this: if we hadn't been doing things this way all along, and had a chance to start over, how would we do things differently?

Those folks at Whole Foods, Google and Starbucks were willing to take a hard look at themselves (or their industries) and answer that question in a potentially painful way. Obviously it's paying off.

Back in my Carbon IQ days we developed a reference tool that was essentially a cheat sheet for getting inside your customers' heads. (Have at it.) It contains a lot of the methodologies that got some of these better companies where they are today. I'm going to pull that out again and take a look at how it can apply specifically to designing customer-facing spaces, which is where I'm focused these days.

Meanwhile, we all need to be asking ourselves about where we're headed and what tools we'll use to get there.

Whatever it takes to avoid YAMB.

( Aug 10 2005, 04:56:41 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]