Don’t Ask People What They Want, Watch What They Do

Don’t Ask People What They Want, Watch What They Do

Source: Nir and Far Nir’s Note: Irene Au is a design partner at Khosla Ventures and former Head of Design at Google, Yahoo, and Udacity. She’ll be

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Don’t Ask People What They Want, Watch What They Do

Nir’s Note: Irene Au is a design partner at Khosla Ventures and former Head of Design at Google, Yahoo, and Udacity. She’ll be speaking at the upcoming Habit Summit in April. (You can register here!) In this interview, she chats with Max Ogles about design strategy for startups.

Q: You have an impressive background as a designer at Google, Yahoo, and now at Khosla Ventures. Could you describe how your design role translates in venture capital?

Irene Au: As entrepreneurs start to recognize how crucial design and design thinking are to the success of their company, they are motivated to understand how to hire good designers, how to position them inside their organizations, and what this means for their product and development.

My role is to help our portfolio companies become successful, particularly as it relates to designing user experience. I wrote an e-book on design and venture capital that discusses this emerging role designers have at venture capital firms.

Q: At a VC firm, most of your work is with entrepreneurs. What would you say is something that they commonly misunderstand about design?

IA: Without a doubt, the most common gap for entrepreneurs is around the use of design research. Design research is all about understanding who you’re building for and what their needs are. With design research, we seek to understand “What are the users’ behavioral patterns and motivations?” and then “How can we anticipate their needs, solve problems for them, and build the experience in a way that fits with their workflow, mental models, and usage patterns?” Companies don’t invest enough in user research because they don’t realize how important and useful it is.

One misconception about user research is that it’s about asking customers what they want, but that’s not what user research is. It’s about actually observing people. Sometimes people cite the Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’” as a reason to not do user research. But user research is not really about asking customers what they want. It’s about observing how customers behave and think.

Another misconception is that user research takes time that companies cannot afford. In fact, user research done well saves companies time and helps them get to the best solution and design faster than they would have otherwise. User research benefits companies in so many profound ways that most companies cannot afford to not do research.

Q: What are some ways that designers might overestimate their ability or neglect the customer?

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