Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. When we interview customers, our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions.
But what happens when you hear a story that stands out from the rest? Maybe the customer tells you explicitly that this is not their usual way of doing things. Or perhaps it just sounds very different from the other stories you’ve heard and you don’t believe it’s indicative of a larger pattern.
How do you fit these atypical stories in with the rest of your continuous discovery work? Today’s Ask Teresa explores this question and serves as a reminder that “atypical” is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can be incredibly powerful in helping us design richer products that work for more people.
‘Atypical’ is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to customer stories. In fact, it can be incredibly powerful in helping us design richer products that work for more people. – Tweet This
Find all of the posts in this series here.
Question: What if the story we collect is atypical for the customer?
We can learn a lot from atypical stories. Most teams make the mistake of thinking that they just need to find the similarities across their customers’ stories and design for that one pattern. But it’s rarely this simple in practice.
Our goal when interviewing is not just to find the patterns. It’s to understand the variation in customer behavior—both the variation from instance to instance for a single customer and the variation from customer to customer.
Our goal when interviewing is to understand the variation in customer behavior—both the variation from instance to instance for a single customer and the variation from customer to customer. – Tweet This
Let’s walk through four reasons why we don’t want to ignore atypical stories and instead treat them like the treasures that they are.
1. Atypical stories aren’t always as atypical as customers think. It’s easy to think that we always do things a certain way and that we only occasionally deviate. In reality, we deviate from what we think is our typical behavior all the time. So the first thing to recognize is: Even if the customer thinks the behavior is atypical, it’s not necessarily.
2. Atypical stories uncover important use cases. Imagine if our cars didn’t have air bags because we typically don’t get in car crashes. Or consider a washing machine with no delicate cycle because we typically wash our clothes on the standard cycle.
When we uncover atypical stories, we learn how to make our products richer, how to make them work for more use cases, and how to make them work for more people.
3. Atypical stories often turn into typical stories. The first time we hear about some odd behavior, it’s easy to write it off as an atypical story. Maybe someone came up with a unique use case for one of your features that wasn’t intended. It’s easy to think nobody else is doing this.
But after interviewing week after week, you might be surprised to see this “atypical” use case pop up again. As product people, it’s easy to project our own view of the “right way” to use a feature. But as we talk to more and more customers, we start to see how there are many “right ways.”
As product people, it’s easy to project our own view of the ‘right way’ to use a feature. But as we talk to more and more customers, we start to see how there are many ‘right ways.’ – Tweet This
One of the benefits of continuous customer interviewing is we get exposed to a lot of different types of stories. We start to see how our own view is incomplete. This is a good thing. You’ll be surprised by how often atypical stories turn into typical stories.
4. We should be designing for “atypical” stories more than we do. When we only focus on “typical” stories, we tend to design for the majority and end up replicating inequities that we don’t intend to.
When we only focus on ‘typical’ stories, we tend to design for the majority and end up replicating inequities that we don’t intend to. – Tweet This
For example, pulse oximeters are medical devices that measure the oxygen saturation in your blood. And it turns out that they work better if you have fairer skin than darker skin. This probably wasn’t intentional discrimination, but the creators likely tested with “typical” users, in “typical” contexts for that team, and overlooked underrepresented folks.
If we only collect typical stories about how software engineers find their jobs, do we design solutions that are more likely to work for men and not women, since most software engineers are men? Or should we be looking for more “atypical” stories so that we don’t contribute to these inequities?
One of the values of continuous interviewing is that we get to hear a diversity of stories. This is a good thing. It allows us to uncover much more variation of experience and allows us to develop much richer products that work for far more people. You can read more about these concepts in Rethinking Product Discovery with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Mind.
I regularly answer questions like this in the Continuous Discovery Habits community. You should join us!
