Why Can't We Just Ask What People Want?

Have you ever built a feature that your customers (or sales team) had been hounding you to build only to find out that people are barely using it, if at all? Well you are not alone. Despite the push for outcomes over outputs, this is the way that most teams still operate. And the results are not great. 90% of features fail to deliver the expected business value.

But why does this keep happening? Why does the massive demand seem to disappear once we deliver?

People care about their problems, not your product.

When people are thinking of potential solutions to their problems they will fall back on their current workarounds and ask you to implement these. They are not thinking about how other companies solve the problem, they are not thinking about new ways the product could dramatically improve processes and, very rarely, are they up to date with how the latest technology could be adapted in their environment.

In short, they are looking for you to solve the problem they have in front of them instead of redesigning their processes to make the problem easier.

Customers think about your product a lot less than you think about it.

People can’t predict their own behaviour

New products and features require customers to change their behaviours. Before your product, people solved the problem in another way so you are asking them to change their behaviour to adopt your product. The challenge here is that people are terrible at predicting their own behaviours.

When talking about their actions in a professional environment, most people will say that they are very logical in their decision making. But the truth is that all decisions are made with emotions.

How our brains make decisions

Much of our understanding of the brain comes from observing people with brain damage. There was a study done in 1996 on “The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex”

What they discovered is that people who had a damaged pre-frontal cortex did not have any impairment to their memory, mathematical ability, language , logic and reasoning. But they were unable to make decisions.

In one experiment they asked people to choose a lunch appointment date. The people were able to discuss the pros and cons of each option but no one date was better than others. There were trade offs with every option. We encounter lots of decisions like this every day; we usually just pick a date and go with it. But that turns out to be an emotional decision. The damage to the pre-frontal cortex limited these people’s ability to feel emotions, and without emotion they could no longer make a decision.

How our brains explain our behaviour

Coming back to interviewing, this introduces a problem. Nobody would say they “felt” one day was better than another. If you asked a person why they chose a date they would give you a logical explanation for why that date was better. Our brains are experts at creating stories to back up our behaviour because we want to believe that we are logical rather than emotion beings.

Another great study that illustrates this point is the 1963 study on “Laterality effects in somesthesis following cerebral commissurotomy in man”. In the 1960’s, people who had severe epilepsy would often undergo surgery that would separate the two hemisphere’s of the brain. The rationale was that epileptic seizures were caused by the uncontrolled firing of neurons and if they could separate the two sides it would limit the propagation of these misfirings. In terms of its main goal it was a successful intervention, but it had some strange side effects.

The left side of the brain controls both speech and the right side of the body. While the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. So the team performed some experiments where they would show messages to the patients right eye and then ask them to explain their behaviour. In one example the message was “Walk”. The patients would stand up and start walking but when asked why they stood up the speech part of the brain did not know about the message they received. Instead of saying “I don’t know” every patient gave an answer: “I wanted to stretch my legs”, “I wanted to get a drink”.

Our brains will always give a reason behind an action, it just often isn’t the real reason.

How this impacts our research

People really believe they will use the features that they ask for and that they will behave in the way they predict. The problem is they are coming up with logical reasons for emotional decisions.

Our challenge in user research is to dig past what people are saying and to uncover the real emotions that are driving behavioural patterns so that we can design solutions that they really want to use.