The New VOC

Have you see the bad rap that design research has gotten lately? People such as Don Norman have been minimizing the impact of design research related to innovation. Maybe you’ve even experienced it yourself. Your team collects lots of "ethnographic" research, you conduct a huge market survey, or you conduct an in-depth evaluation of competitive products and the product concepts you develop just don’t resonate with consumers or worse, the product doesn’t take off when it gets to market. Why is this happening and why do I continue to hear about it more and more from companies who design and develop products? One word: complexity. Ok, two words: missed complexity.

VOC is typically an approach that “listens to the customer” through face-to-face interviews, surveys, complaint cards, even “ethnographic” observations. It’s the focus of design research efforts and it too often assumes that through these means you will understand all the problems and needs people have. It places too much of an emphasis on people who a) are not designers and b) do not know about technology or solutions that may be available or coming in the future. Even when customer input is used appropriately, there is a whole complexity of their relationship with their environment, goals, regulations, culture, financial, technological and social factors that must be understood. When design research focuses on the “voice” and not the complexity of the entire person’s environment, comes up short.

Design research must think bigger than the voice of the customer (no matter how in-depth the study) if we are to provide input to our design teams that improves our chances of market success. A simple way to think about this is to reconsider the term VoC. The ‘voice’ of the customer is important to collect, but in complex environments, it’s not enough. I’d like to suggest a different meaning for VoC to help us expand our thinking and approach. VoC now means…The unVeiling of Complexity. Ok, I had to shoehorn in the “V” but UoC isn’t as memorable. It is the conscious act of looking well beyond the customer and beyond what they can say or report. Too often a product design research project gets constrained by it being a “voice of customer” project. It needs to be an understanding (unveiling of the complexity). The customer and their voice is just one part of the bigger picture that the design team needs to understand. It also means involving a broader range of disciplines in investigation the complexity (for example engineering). Voice of Customer (VOC) research is so yesterday. Forget what you think VOC is and understand that it is so much more.