First, Know Your Customers

By Linda Beebe, Senior Director, PsycINFO, American Psychological Association—The theme of the 2009 Annual PSP Conference was “Focus on the User.”  To focus on them, you must know who they are, how they work, and what they want from you.  Two sessions in the pre-conference meeting “The Development Cycle for Digitally-Enabled Publishing: Technology, Intelligence, and Listening to Your Users” were particularly helpful.  Kurt Gerdenich, who is Vice President of Technology at Cengage Learning discussed the academic textbook market, and Winston Port, Director of User Centered Design for Elsevier shared his methodologies for user-centered design.

Each gave insights into a structured approach to really understanding your customers.  First, they survey a broad group.  With digital products, we also have many other ways to gather information, such as analyzing web logs or reviewing customer support logs.  Have you done any usability testing recently?  Next there are one-on-one interviews with structured questions.  Both speakers cautioned against using focus groups for discovery because you run into group think.  Students, they said, don’t have as much guile; therefore, focus groups can work well with them. Gerdenich and Port also conduct observational research with cross-functional teams.  The team is there to watch and learn, not to talk or to get in the way.

When you have all this information in hand, it is time to analyze and normalize.  Port recommended framing “need” statements with verb and noun phrases.  Then you can sort the needs into like groups along themes in a group workshop.  The result should be a relatively small set of customer profiles, which you can then turn into personas.  Not all of these may be profitable for your organization, so you will want to focus on the ones that will be.  The payoff is that you need to consult only 8 to 10 people who match any profile as you get feedback throughout your development process.

Gerdenich pointed out that any additional costs in creating your market segmentation are more than covered by a reduction in design costs and, of course, more successful outcomes.  Both speakers noted that thorough market segmentation can be accomplished in a short time, if the teams are established and set free to concentrate on the tasks.  The payoff, Port noted, is that you avoid three common failings:1) the hummingbird effect where everyone is flapping their wings 150 miles per hour while they remain stationary; 2) featuritis; 3) a solution in search of a problem.  His basic framework is to understand, design, evaluate, and continue the cycle.

Linda Beebe is Senior Director of PsycINFO at the American Psychological Association where her department produces 5 major databases.  A former SSP board member and participant in several SSP committees, Linda is the current treasurer for CrossRef.