Stop Designing for the Ideal and the Permanent
Chapter 2: Principle 1 - Growth comes by Capturing Situational Markets
Dear friends,
Today’s post is for all of you experience designers out there. We have a tendency—actually it’s a belief—to design experiences for the ideal customer, the ideal moment, the ideal market. And when we do, we attempt to make those solutions permanent.
This mindset is detrimental to growth. I’m not reiterating the importance of being agile or doing design sprints. I’m talking about the importance of thinking systemically about people’s changing circumstances.
Would love your feedback! I have links to the other posts in Chapters 1 and 2 below.
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Stop Designing for the Ideal and the Permanent
The final lesson of this chapter is that people’s situations change. When you focus on situational markets, you acknowledge the reality of markets. They don’t stand still. For decades one of the most soothing fabrications that companies told themselves is that people in their target audiences didn’t change. They would never it say it that way, but when a company creates traditional segmentation, they create a ‘who’ box.
That ‘who’ box is fixed. Once the traditional segmentation work is done, there are a fixed number of people who fit the profile. Their attitudes are almost all the same. The way the company describes the need doesn’t change. It’s a sweet fiction, a story meant to create confidence amongst the different teams that must rally to create and sell the solution.
But the reality is that people’s situations change.
Advocates for traditional segmentation might argue that their modeling accounts for those changes. If you’re selling birthday cakes, the need stays the same, but new people come into the birthday cake market every year while others exit. (Get it?) They argue that their segmentation shows the differences between Millennial birthday cake buyers and Gen Z buyers (two demographic ‘who’ boxes). Or they may argue that their segmentation addresses only those time periods when people are in the birthday cake market. Thus, while the need only arises a few days before the birthday, the attitudes and behaviors of their customers don’t change.
By now, hopefully, you are beginning to anticipate my retort. What about birthdays that happen on vacation? Or birthdays when you are alone? Or birthdays when you have a big business get-together? Does the same cake work for all situations as long as the customer is a Millennial?
During the pandemic, every person’s situation changed. And, therefore, they needed new tools, new entertainment, new ways of getting things done. Companies had to adapt. It was painful but many companies realized that they could adjust. Those that did survived.
The pandemic taught companies that when situations change, they cannot design for the ideal or the permanent. Which is exactly what most experience designers, CX people, and design thinkers tend to do. We need to stop designing for the ideal and the permanent and start designing for the near future needs of customers. Companies must start seeing their customers as people who make decisions based on what is going on around them rather than as idealized, fixed target markets.
When companies begin to design for customer situations, they learn how to make their customer experiences modular. The way they train employees becomes modular. The way they design platforms emphasizes components. The way that they build spaces allows them or the customer to adjust the space to the specific requirements of the situation. Their channel strategy emphasizes modularity. Even their brand strategy becomes modular.
One of my favorite success stories from the pandemic was a dine-in restaurant chain in the southern US market. The company had a wide menu of classic American fare - salads, chicken wings, hamburgers, pasta, bread, and so forth. Clearly, the company couldn’t rely on dine-in customers anymore. There weren’t any! Like other restaurants, they had to capture customers through food delivery channels.
Afraid that they would be just one of the hundreds of restaurants providing plastic bags full of styrofoam-wrapped food, the company decided to create five new brands and turn their food operations into ghost kitchens. Suddenly they had five times more opportunities to engage with people who want to eat (which is pretty much everyone). One brand focused on Italian cuisine. Another brand focused on wings and other things fried. Another was more salad driven. And, of course, they had their hamburger focused brand. They also kept their original brand for people who had a hankering for that brand.
It was the same food they had always made but the brand experience changed depending on what the customer was in mood for. That’s modularity. And that’s also situational market strategy.
In addition to being modular, companies need to focus their energies on the near future needs of their customers. No one can predict a pandemic. But companies can predict that many customers will have to deal with uncertainty in their lives. Uncertainty is a universal near future need. There are many more. And we will cover some of them in later chapters.
When I say that experience designers are focused on the ideal and the permanent, I mean that the way they think about user needs is often prescribed by techniques that consider certain functionality to be ideal. There are best practices for usability. There are best practices for service design. Or, the big one: there is an ideal journey that the ideal customer wants. And the goal of design is to get as close as possible to that ideal journey. Once that journey map is finished, there’s no changing it. It becomes The Strategy, and it is made permanent.
We can do better. Companies can ask their experience design teams to think about how future changes in people’s circumstances are likely to create new situational markets. We can focus design on the near future need, not the ideal need. The near future need will never be completely understood. And strategists and designers should not try to perfectly understand the need. That regresses back to the ideal and the permanent.
The brands the restaurant chain created during the pandemic were not perfect. And no doubt not all of those brands succeeded after the restrictions where lifted. But imagine what that company could have become had it learned from the pandemic to anticipate future food needs of its customers. That’s an engine for growth.
A situational market mindset makes a company plan for constant, understandable change. It forces the leadership team to anticipate future needs. It challenges the designers and developers to be realistic and to think systemically. You cannot create a modular design without understanding the system for delivery.
A situational market mindset helps companies who create durable goods (cars, refrigerators, and so on) think about the number of different situations the durable good can support. The company designs in components to be activated at some future milestone. Or when circumstances for the customer change.
For companies who produce less durable things (like food, concerts, coaching, or causes), a situational market mindset serves to increase proactivity. Instead of being ‘highly responsive’ to customer needs, these companies are able to identify situations ahead of time, plan for them and deliver. Their customers feel cared for. Their ability to deliver on empathy and other emotional jobs to be done goes up!
Click here for book outline with links to posts
This post about Experience Strategy Certification is also helpful.