May 2010

Don’t Listen to Patrons

Yesterday was my day off. As usual, I spent the morning reading and staring out the window

at my local coffee shop. The place wasn’t overflowing, but it was steady. It’s a smaller place off the beaten pat

h, so it never is too busy anyway. 15 years ago, this place wouldn’t have existed.

As Steve McCallion notes: “Imagine twenty years ago asking a room full of moms if they’d

be interested inpaying $4.50 for a cup of coffee. . . We would never have starbucks.”

Part of the Apple approach is not listening to customers. They never ask anyone ab

out their products. They don’t create focus groups. They

don’t run trials. They just create.

Existing Realities Limit Future Possibilities

That’s McCallion again. As he notes, consumers, patrons, are limited by the services that already have. Focus groups can tell us what patrons like that we already offer (storytime anyone?), but they’ll never tell us what they need. In fact, the more people we ask, the more likely we are to get boring middle of the road answers.

I’ll admit that much of my interests in libraries are related to assessment, seeing what people do. However, I don’t see a problem with testing and getting analytic results. After all assessment can only see what works, it cannot tell us what ought to be. So what do we do?

Creating New Services, Don’t Imitate

There are a variety of books out there, Design Driven Innovation, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Blue Ocean Strategy, that discuss creating new services, so I won’t go into it too much. Rather, I would encourage libraries to think broadly. What we absolutely should absolutely not do is copy successful businesses that are different than us. We should not add coffeeshops because that’s what Border’s has. We should not try to become county Social Services because it already exists (although partnerships might be a good idea). Rather, we need to look at how our well established trust with the community can lead to new services that no one anticipated.

And before anyone has a chance to argue that businesses can serve less people  and can thus specialize more, I’d like to point out that my home (Madison, WI) has 10 Starbucks and only 9 public libraries. We are an equal presence, but they are changing and we are standing still.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/180837714/sizes/m/

Starting new projects is hard. The reasons are wide: it’s hard to come up with ideas, it’s even harder to get funding, it’s still harder to create staff buy-in and creating buy-in from the users can sometimes seem impossible.

As if that weren’t difficult enough, there’s a fundamental split in how to begin creating new resources or services. In short, an organization can either be driven by user needs and collective wisdom to create services that fill a niche. Or, they can be visionary and create products and services that users do not know they need, but, after they are created, can’t live without. So here they are, I’ll call the first the Google Approach and the second the Apple Approach. Granted this division is very artificial and Google in particular would sneer at the very idea that they are chasing users.

The Google Approach: Collective Wisdom and User Needs

If you’ve ever clicked on the “Even More” tab in Google. You’ll see that they have lots and lots of services. However, at the end of the day, most users settle on two or three (gmail, google docs, and, of course, the search engine). The main strategy I see in Google is that they select an information niche and they seek to fulfill it. With the exception of Google Wave, which given the hype seems to have failed to capture the public, Google is seeking to develop answers to existing needs, not creating a new class of services.

So here is how this mindset works:

Guiding Principles:

• Users have needs that can be addressed with technology: It is our job to figure out how to answer those needs.
• We can create great services by creating a variety of products that help a variety of users rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Entering a field with competition is not bad if you can be superior: For example, there are piles of financial websites, but Google Finance sought to be the best with the power of google algorithms.
• Many creative minds will produce a better company/product than one genius: Google is famous for giving all employees 20% of their work time to pursue any idea no matter how radical (hence the elevator to the moon)

Advantages

• You might be surprised: Some ventures will inevitably fail, but many will stick.
• You can help more people by focusing on many small problems.
• A superior central project can have many useful branches: Once users trust the main product, they will be more willing to try later projects

Disadvantages

• Consensus can drown out creativity: The collective mind my be very good at locating problems, but it may not be visionary.
• One great product or many mediocre products: Spreading efforts too thin may be damaging in the long term.

The Apple Approach: Creativity and Vision trump Analysis

With Apple, there is very little user testing, no focus groups, no surveys. The apple approach is to create a beautiful, simple and amazing product. They create fewer products and many of them are new and unlike anything prior.

Guiding Principles

• Innovator’s Dilemma: This approach was well presented in the book the Innovator’s Dilemma which essentially says that innovative products will necessarily be contrary to user demands. Users have expectations that are built by current availability. They can’t demand something that doesn’t exist, so when new products come along, they might be rejected at first.
• Don’t listen to users: This ties with the first principle. Users cannot envision and predict everything. Many thinkers have argued that User-Centered innovation is bound to fail.

Advantages

• More time to create: When you don’t listen to users, you don’t have to waste time doing testing or surveys or creating focus groups. This effort can be redirected to creative endeavors.
• Accepted products become indispensable: How many can’t leave home without an iPod? Easy enough. In addition, if we constantly chase user demands we are setting ourselves up for eternal competition. That’s hard.

Disadvantages

• You got to believe: Many great innovations die because the organizations behind them become scared and bail out to early. If an idea is good, then it needs time.
• Backlash: Everyone believes they are right. If we ignore users they may get upset. Hiding behind statistics is safe and easy.

So what’s a library to do?

A hybrid approach is best. Libraries do not have the large user base and flow of cash that major companies have. We will never be able to create an iPod. Nonetheless, for too long libraries have been over focused on user needs (often on a very old conservative group of users). As this happens we lose relevancy and that will be our ultimate undoing.

In the coming weeks, I’ll focus more on applying these approaches in libraries. I’ll spend more time on the Apple approach since I’ve certainly spent plenty of time on analyzing users.  However, the ultimate goal is to keep libraries moving forward and that means taking risks.

To end, here’s a great video on how to kill creativity. I suggest keeping a scorecard and giving yourself a point every time you’ve heard one of these phrases:

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.