Make Marketing History

The views of a marketing deviant.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

What Questions Are you Answering?


I spent some hours yesterday critiquing the usability of a forthcoming expensive website and did so largely on the basis that the designers had not asked what journey they expected their users to be taking. So, it was particularly apposite to see Ben pointing out the excellence of Google's print dialogue box as reproduced above. A dialogue box that is designed with the user's journey/questions in mind.

Businesses provide answers for and to customers' questions. Marketing which starts with the design of your product/service should be similarly predicated on those questions. Putting yourself in the customers' shoes is what you have to do, but that does not mean asking yourself or pointless focus groups whether they would like a certain new feature.

Putting yourself in the customers' shoes is all about imagining the journey they want to take in using your product/service. It's about predicting the questions they are going to want answered and it's about making sure you answer all of them better than anyone else.

1 Comments:

Blogger Robert said...

As someone who knows abit about he mighty G, I can say that as much as the company comprises of amazing brains at every level [bar one, but we won't go into that], when it comes to creating or developing products/tools that are 'human focused', they ensure the guys on the team are humans first, designers/engineers second - and involve plenty of input from 'real life', not just techno/marketing specialists - something adland could learn from.

Yeah there's other reasons too - but you cannot underestimate how important that it in getting these sorts of well considered output.

12:36 AM, March 25, 2009  

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