Marketing-Centered Design

A reasonable alternative to user-centered design is marketing-centered design. After all, the primary goal of marketing is to identify needs and wants in the marketplace and target a company's products and services to satisfy those needs and wants. In effect, it is a marketer's job to talk to users, understand what users want, and make sure that the resulting product satisfies those wants. This sounds much like the goal of user-centered design. However, since marketers have a better understanding of the big picture and of the capabilities of current technology than users typically do, they are able to identify solutions that users are unable to see. And unlike some users, marketers have no trouble expressing their ideas. They are not known for being shy.

While marketing plays an important role in creating successful software, marketing-centered design isn't a guaranteed road to success. While marketers understand users and, in a sense, represent users, the fact is that marketers aren't users. In terms of user interface design, they are no more representative of users than engineering or management. Furthermore, marketers aren't designers either. Like everyone else, marketers have their point of view about user interfaces, but their opinion about user interface design has no overly special significance compared to anyone else's.

TIP
Marketers aren't users.

One common mistake that marketers make is asking users what they want and believing what the users tell them. They forget that users can't always be taken at their word. Many users say something like "I don't want a whole bunch of fancy features. I just want to get my work done." But, while I'm sure that users honestly believe this, I wouldn't recommend using this statement to identify what users actually want to buy. For example, Microsoft makes two office productivity products: Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works. Office is the full-blown product, whereas Works is the simplified product, but each allows the user to perform roughly the same tasks. Guess which one sells more. I personally prefer Office. Why? Works might do everything I need, but I would prefer not to find out the hard way. I prefer the safer bet.

One of the world's largest and most successful consumer product manufacturers set out to create a new product that would overwhelm its competition. The company employed its vast marketing and research resources to create a product that a majority of consumers said they preferred over the competition during the direct testing of over 200,000 people. They launched the product with a $100 million advertising campaign and received what is estimated to be over $1 billion in free publicity. Yet ironically, instead of being one of the greatest marketing successes of all time, it was one of the worst marketing disasters in history. When the product was released in 1985, it was an embarrassing failure. Of course, I am referring to Coca-Cola's New Coke product. While there are many explanations for this disaster (the company didn't listen to its loyal customers, who preferred the old Coke, but instead listened to its competitors' customers; what customers say they like isn't necessarily what they will buy; and so forth), you need to understand that decisions based on extensive market research and user testing are not guaranteed to be successful.

While you should always listen to your users, you should not incorporate their suggestions uncritically. There is a difference between what users say they want and what users actually want. A wise software developer learns to recognize the difference.

TIP
While you should always listen to your users, you should not incorporate their suggestions without question. There is a difference between what users say they want and what users actually want.



Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
ISBN: 0735605866
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 334

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