What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win (10 page)

A D
AY IN THE
L
IFE OF

 

A young professional 30-something graphic designer living in an urban area and commuting to work by subway. A suburban homemaker and mother of two who runs a small tie-dyed shirt business on the side. A 42-year-old female teacher and part-time music instructor. A 75-year-old semiretired male business owner.

You’ve seen all these people, right? Sure. But you probably haven’t explored their needs for computing or for digital media.

One tool that Apple teams use is the development of
customer personas
. Customer personas are small, simple biographical sketches of a “stereotype” customer and her typical behavior. These personas can be developed and storyboarded into an assortment of customer experiences and needs. They add a sense of realism and purpose to the process, more so than the usual segmentation exercises, which tend not to have more than four profiles to work with.

Some of these profiles are mainstream; some are at the fringes. From them, ideas can flow about what’s wrong with, and what could be better about, a customer experience. It’s amazing how few companies do this, relying instead on standard market segments like “producers,” “technologists,” and so forth.

Seeing
the customer is the first step toward
thinking
like the customer. Once he had a vision of a target customer in mind, Steve and the team appraised that customer’s experience and put on that customer’s shoes in the interest of giving him a new, better, and previously unthought-of experience.

S
EE THE
E
XPERIENCE
 

When you get right down to it, any product or service is an experience. That experience starts when a customer first notices your product, and it ends when she disposes of it or replaces it. Most companies have gotten “hip” to the idea of a “total customer experience,” and see the elements of the experience, the “whole product,” around the core product. But some do it better than others.

What differentiates Steve Jobs’s and Apple’s approach is the depth of their observation and the takeaways from the customer experience.

C
USTOMER
P
AIN
 

Steve and his design teams were well known for appraising the sources of customer pain and discontent with a given product or process. If an operating system would hang or cause confusion or would take too long to boot, if there were too many buttons on a cell phone, if there
were too many steps in a music download process, Steve and his team noted those experiences right away.

This approach included assessing not only the pain associated with a product and its related processes, but also the pain felt by a customer persona. The team examined the persona protagonist’s life, how well current products served his needs, and how future ideas and products could make his life better.

The April 2003 introduction of the iTunes music store is a great example of analyzing the “pain and pleasure” of a customer experience. During his presentation, Steve shared four benefits of the “status quo” music download experience at the time:

 

•  Vast selection of music, “better than any record store on the planet”

•  Unlimited CD burning

•  Music could be stored on any MP3 player

•  It’s free!

But there was pain too, not only with the technology, but also from the fact that the downloads weren’t really legal:

•  Unreliable downloads (would shut down in midstream)

•  Unreliable quality

•  No previews

•  No album cover art or other info

•  “It’s stealing”

He went on to suggest that “most people don’t focus on these things,” but looked at only the good stuff. These pain factors led to the historic negotiations with the music industry to create the 99-cent download and the iTunes software platform to download and manage music. Both new ideas, considered disruptive at the time, have become industry standards. In Steve’s words: “Music downloads, done right.”

S
IMPLICITY VS
. C
OMPLEXITY
 

Steve was a stickler for getting things simple and keeping them that way. Complex keyboard sequences, like Microsoft’s ubiquitous “right-click” controls, drove him and the design team nuts. The nominal approach is, “How can we make something better by making it simpler?” Instead of arguing about how to construct user manuals, the team strives to make them obsolete. Ditto for “out-of-box experience” sheets to get customers started with a product.

The one-button iPhone is the best example, but all through the company’s history, and especially since 2000, product physical and functional designs are simple,
clean, straightforward, and clear. The team strives for “elegant simplicity,” a concept that we’ll take up again in
Chapter 7
.

S
ENSORY
E
XPERIENCE
 

Those of you readers who live on the West Coast are probably familiar with the regional chain of fast-food restaurants known as In-N-Out Burger. Founded in 1948 and still family-owned, with 258 locations in four states, In-N-Out sells a simple assortment of hamburgers and french fries. It has only four main-course items on the menu, in contrast to the dozens offered by competitors.

A hamburger joint? As a model for a sensory customer experience? It’s pretty amazing, but it’s true. And the lines of people waiting for their burgers at all hours of the day tells you it’s something special.

The burgers are good and the fries are pretty good, but the sensory experience from start to finish is excellent. The sights, sounds, and smells are excellent. From the moment you get close, specially designed kitchen exhaust fans share the aroma with the nearby environs. When you walk in, the place is spotless, with a small crew cleaning up constantly. When you use the drive-through, large, high-quality audio components are used to take and play back your order—there’s no scratchy miscommunication. The help is clean-cut, articulate,
and smart (and paid more than most). If the workers get their white uniforms dirty on the job, they change to clean ones immediately. A large plate-glass window at the drive-through allows you to see everything that’s going on in the kitchen. The french fries are cut from raw potatoes in plain sight.

Steve Jobs didn’t run a hamburger joint, and we’re all probably better off because of that. But if he had, In-N-Out would be a good model. Steve and his designers appreciated how products bring with them a sensory experience. In the case of Apple products, there is really no smell, but the sights, touches, and sounds are all of utmost importance. Any Apple design—including the box and the packaging—considers the sensory experience. The results are obvious for anyone who has bought, opened, and used an Apple product.

U
SING A
L
OOKING
G
LASS
 

Over time, it has become apparent that Steve Jobs had an extraordinary ability to see customers’ pain and to understand the customer experience and what about it could be improved. We mere mortals may not have such clairvoyance, or if we do, we may not be so confident in our own perceptions. So as a brief departure from the “What Would Steve Jobs Do?” theme, here are some things you can do or think about to
enhance your view and your leadership of the customer experience:

 

•  
“Carpet Time.”
Innovation expert and author Nicholas Webb uses this term to describe a close, real-time observation of the customer experience. The term arose from his experiences watching his young children play, but he applies it in his practice, just watching a customer use a product from start to finish. Give a customer a product, in a brand-new box or not, and watch what she does with it. It’s not a focus group—it’s a start-to-finish observation, and you’re doing it personally as a team leader.

•  
Observe the mistakes of first movers
. Apple has typically not been the first to market in most of its categories. Personal computers, MP3 players, cell phones, and tablets all existed in some form before Apple perfected the category. Paying close attention to—and taking apart—first movers’ mistakes is a great way to add customer value, and a great way to lead an organization. The Japanese did it with cars. Southwest did it with air travel. Don’t be first—make it perfect instead.

•  
See beneath the surface
. Steve Jobs intuitively grasped what was beneath the surface that was causing customer pain, and what could be done
about it. You and most of us might not be able to do that. So when you watch or talk to a customer, try to get to that “what’s really bugging you about this experience?” question. You may not get an answer that you can use, but it’s guaranteed that you won’t get one if you don’t ask.

PAIN PILL, PLEASE
 

There’s a lot of pain out there, and there’s a lot to gain if you take a close look. One of my pet peeves is the growing use of self-checkout scanners. Have you ever been held up in a line of four people waiting for someone to get a readable bar code for a 25-cent sprinkler part? It happens all the time. How many times have you had to call the attendant to resolve a problem (or prove that you’re “of age” to buy that bottle of wine in a grocery)? How much customer pain have groceries and home improvement stores caused just to save a few $9-an-hour checkers? Think about it. Some groceries are, given their recent announcements that they are cutting back on self-checkout. Thank goodness.

Customer pain provided a good opportunity for CarMax, a rapidly growing retail-format purveyor of used cars. Its business model is, quite simply, to get away from the stereotypical used-car salesperson and used-car-buying
process, and to add a bit of computer-aided management science to stocking and pricing decisions. This just goes to show that customer-driven innovations don’t have to be high-tech.

And another pet peeve: the solar industry. Solar energy just hasn’t really “crossed the chasm” to become mainstream. Is it the technology? I don’t think so—I attribute it to customer pain. Customers must work with a dealer who marks everything up 100 percent and typically makes the whole installation sound more high-tech than it really is. It’s a selling process, not a buying process. There’s a big sales pitch and a huge dollar outlay. So, make modular solar panels available at Home Depot, so that you can add them as you need them, with a plug-in inverter with some basic installation instructions; if you do, a lot more people, including me, will go solar.

Fix the experience
.

B
E
THE
C
USTOMER
 

Finally, with the customer and the customer experience firmly in mind, the next step is simply to roll up your sleeves, take off your shoes, and put on the customers’ shoes. See things through the customer’s eyes. This is the third and final element of Steve Jobs’s “passionate
empathy” for the customer. Again, you as the leader need to do this, and not rely on others to do it for you.

The process can be done as a series of questions, something like this:

W
HAT
W
OULD
I W
ANT
?
 

This sounds simple, but it amazes me how many leaders fail to consider what they would want in a product themselves, or as a typical customer. As the saying goes, there may be no “I” in “leadership,” but there is an “I” in innovation: what would “I” want? If you’ve gotten the customer right by seeing her and seeing her experience, the “what would I want?” part should come pretty clearly.

Steve Jobs went a step further. Beyond just thinking about “What would I want?” from his own perspective, he encouraged his team members to play the same game. The designers and engineers and marketers and accountants and office assistants—everyone down the line—were encouraged to think about what they would want in a new product design or in a new product concept. Anything’s possible, and if you want it and a lot of other people want it and it makes sense, why, let’s build it.

Workers are more passionate about building things that they want, and that real customers want.

W
HAT
A
RE THE
D
EEP
N
EEDS
?
 

We’ve already covered this one. Does a customer just want a portable music player? Or does he want one that has superb sound and a superb sensory experience that’s really easy to use, really looks cool, and is supported by 99-cent, one-click, easy-to-get songs? It’s critical to think about the deep need, the
whole
need—don’t just stop at the first or second product attribute that solves a customer issue.

W
HAT
W
OULD
S
URPRISE AND
D
ELIGHT
?
 

If you check into an average-priced hotel, you expect average features—a reasonably comfortable bed, clean towels, reasonable quiet from the outside street, an inside entry, pleasant décor. But what if you got a really nice breakfast in the morning? A free newspaper? Turn-down service?

True, these things are available at fancy hotels, and you’d probably expect them if you paid a fancy hotel’s price. But what happens when you pay an average price? These “bonuses” will surprise and delight you.

Conversely, if enough “surprise and delight” factors are there consistently, you’ll eventually be willing to pay a higher price. Customers respond well to—and pay more for—features, sensory experiences, and qualities
that surprise and delight them. Simple surprises are the best—surprises that make the experience simpler, rather than more complicated, have the most impact. If you approach your business with a customer mindset, you’ll always consider what might surprise or delight that customer. Remember, customers aren’t likely to tell you, because they know only what you provide today. If they knew, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

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