Starting in 2008, Wal-Mart embarked on an ambitious project to improve the shopping experience in their stores. Code-named "Project Impact" the idea was to create a "better" Wal-Mart.
First, they sent out surveys. In the surveys, customers identified that they wanted cleaner, less cluttered stores. With this information in-hand, Wal-Mart began a huge multi-million dollar store refurbishment program. They slimmed down their inventory by 15%, redesigned shelves, and removed pallets from the aisles.
The result? Sales plummeted.
Phil Terry estimates that this experiment cost Wal-Mart at around $1.85 billion dollars. He explains what went wrong:
[Wal-Mart] relied on what customers said in a survey versus what they actually do in the stores. What's easy to verbalize is not necessarily what's important
The technology industry is obsessed with making things better: make it faster, create a better design, add more features, give the user more power. So it's confusing to us when we build something "better" but customers don't buy it.
How many times have we heard: "I'm building a better Basecamp" or "I'm building a better email client". These projects get released, but usually don't get anywhere. Why?
Let's say you've set out to build the best fishing lure ever made. You craft an aesthetic design, source high-quality materials, and design the hook so the fish is less likely to get away. You've done all this work but you've made a huge mistake: you haven't gone to see what fish are actually biting at. It doesn't matter how much "better" your lure is: if the fish aren't biting, you've wasted your time.
It's the same for customers. Instead of setting out to build something "better", we need to watch and see what customers are actually doing. Where are the fish biting? Some examples:
"I just need an easy way to share big files." Boom! Dropbox.
"I like sharing my photos and making them look cool." Bam! Instagram.
"I want to edit my business website myself." Kapow! Wordpress.
The hardest part of this is resisting our urge to tell people "But this is the best way to do it!" It doesn't matter. We need to follow what people are doing as opposed to what we want them to do.
Cheers,
@mijustin
PS: Want to build products that people want? I'm writing a book about that.