Creating Empathy and Customization with When Statements
Chapter 2: Principle 1—Growth comes by Capturing Situational Markets
Friends,
In this section of chapter 2, I start to layout design principles to help strategists and designers make decisions using situational market ‘when statements.’ I have purposefully held off explaining the importance of situational markets to customizing experiences because I felt it was too much to cover early on in the chapter. But from now on I’m going to assume that you understand what a situational market is, how it’s different from a traditional market, and why I’m not focused on personas.
Like the other posts, there’s an outline provided at the end of this post. Let’s jump in.
Creating Empathy and Humanizing When Statements
A key goal of tools like personas is to help employees understand and empathize with their customers. This laudable goal can still be achieved through when statements. You can create visualizations of your when statements that help your teams understand people’s situational needs. For example, consider this board that might serve a large, fast food restaurant chain. On the board we see the situation the company is trying to address: When people are traveling alone, and they are hungry. And then there are elements that are added to bring the situation to life. There are real people who are describing the seven most important factors that the experience designers need to address: speed, health factors, recommendations, food type, activities, cleanliness, and emotional state.
The design factors for your company’s when statements may be completely different.
Below the real people factor statements, other information can be provided that helps the organization to understand how the company will identify situations (Contextual Data), what tools or channels currently support people in the situation, how people commonly adjust their environment, and so forth. Again, your when statement board will likely include other elements. But this visual will get you started.
You will notice that there are no demographics, no psychographics, and no real attitudinal data. Instead, there are elements that will help your company do a better job for anyone in that situation. The size of the market is clearly stated. The job to get done is there. It may very well be the same job to do for other situations, but now you can customize the experience for individuals who are traveling alone and hungry.
Value and Customization Revisited
When the whole company recognizes a situation and can respond to it, the customer experiences something incredible. It’s like everyone is focused on their need. I started this book by revisiting Pine & Gilmore’s groundbreaking framework, the progression of economic value. They were so right. The secret to value creation in experiences is customization. Or, in other words, treating people like individuals.
I have just argued that you should aggregate factors in a situation—and not focus on individual preferences. Which raises an important question.
Does understanding the situation generally treat people as individuals? No, but it does a far better job than by simply focusing on preferences. To explain why, I need to take you back to the old days of predictive analytics.
Not so long ago, Netflix started customizing your viewing experience in ways that you could never do with traditional, linear television. And people were amazed. The tool would remember what you watched and then serve up recommendations to you. Customization. If you watched Westerns and liked a movie, the next time you logged on, your browsing experience would be chock full of Westerns. If you watched Romances and liked a movie, the software determined that you had a preference for Romances. It would take some heavy lifting on your part to find shows that weren’t Romances.
What at first seemed to be an amazing form of personalization, soon began to get on people’s nerves. They hated the assumption that they were only interested in the genre that they watched. You probably remember the experience. People created workarounds to help them see new and interesting content. They set up multiple profiles and chose difference preferences for each profile. They tried to retrain the algorithm. But then the tool would only show movies that were similar to the ones the users had recently liked.
People’s interests change. Their preferences evolve. Their needs change. Trying to anticipate their needs based on past behavior limits their ability to change what they want. That’s not a good way to create value through customization.
Netflix has since changed their software. Now you can scroll through topical categories that show a wider range of content. (These topics are essentially organizing movies around emotional or social jobs to be done.) Within these categories, Netflix balances preferences with new content and social recommendations, which gives the user far more control, while still customizing the experience.
What Netflix learned, and what many other company’s still need to learn, is that people want control over the customization features. There’s an easy slope to bad design that labels people by the content they recently consumed. Labels like ‘she’s a romance viewer’ or, ‘he’s an action viewer’ force people into boxes. The same boxes that blinded Sony. The ‘who’ boxes.
When strategists study situations, it’s okay to be somewhat general about factors affecting the situation. (Like: the when statement example above: speed, health factors, recommendations, food type, activities, cleanliness, and emotional state). Then, we can build onto those factors controls that allow the customer to adjust experience to their specific needs. If they want to maintain those settings, we let them. That’s what customization should look like.
Click here for book outline with links to posts
This post about Experience Strategy Certification is also helpful.