Circumstances

We often pay little attention to circumstances. That dialectic tends to be dissolved by taking sides: the universal or the particular. Theory or practice. Ideas or circumstances.

It seems like a subject far removed from the business of creating and managing products, but it touches its very heart. In fact, the reason a large share of the effort spent in that field misses the mark —either because it never comes to life, or because it does but never turns a profit— is bound up with this neglect of circumstances. It is a neglect that many ideas are born with and, once they take shape, one that accompanies their entire growth, the way early poor nutrition shapes the course of a body.

The main reason circumstances are the essential ingredient of what we cook when we make products is that the people we make them for —people like us— live in their own world of intentions, needs and purposes. Although a great deal has been written about this, from interaction design to the psychology of perception, taking in a broad spectrum of behavioural sciences along the way, we have never really grasped its implications. When we shut ourselves inside our ivory tower of our product, our attention ends up stolen by our concerns about the market, the customers and the competition.

It is only natural that, from there, we try to create products that connect with the market, the customers and the competition. But that often fail to connect with people's intentions.

People want to get things done. That is no secret. We don't look at the phone on the table to appraise its attributes; we look at the phone on the table to see whether the message we are waiting for has arrived. We don't turn on the television to assess the quality of the start-up sequence; we turn on the television to see whether the latest episode of the season we are watching is up. We don't open a website to admire the carefully considered colour palette; we open a website to find cinema tickets, fast.

The circumstances live in those tos. Because we are synthesising animals —purpose is the synthesis— all that analysis and weighing of attributes carried out from the ivory tower may leave us satisfied, as experts in marketing, or business, or product in general, but it does not connect with the tos. Worse still, it ignores them, and so we condemn the two to never meet.

When we have nothing yet, not even the product itself, and no clarity about it either, the smartest decision is to get close to the people who might become our future customers. To spend time among them; to talk to them; to observe their intentions so that we can build something that connects with them. Out of that time together comes a sensitivity that is the foundation of a future intuition, indispensable for making reasonable decisions in the phases that follow.

When we do have something, we always have a natural conversation available to us through support and customer service. Most of the time, every one of those conversations is an opportunity to understand the circumstances of what customers are trying to achieve. User tests and purpose-built tools can complement this, but they never quite reach the day-to-day in which customers face their own purposes.