Product Behavior

Here’s a tool that we use often both to analyze and plan consumer experience. I’ll talk about it here as a piece of a product design process, but we use it for service design, retail design, even to plan a business model.

Think about designing a new multifunction product–some piece of electronics or gizmo. It does many things. How do we think about the structure of the experience? How do we decide how to prioritize features so we don’t end up with a thousand buttons on the front of the device? How does the device line up with the consumer’s needs?

Everything a consumer does with a product happens with some frequency, and with some urgency. Some tasks are primary: they happen all the time and they’re where the consumer wants to apply his energy. Some happen much less frequently and are less important to the user. Some happen very infrequently but are very urgent. See this figure, which groups these events into four groups:

“Primary” events are those which are most frequent, and most urgent–defining urgency in terms of importance to consumer (ie. if the consumer needs to get it done, it’s urgent). “Seconday” tasks are frequent but less urgent. “Auxiliary” tasks are neither frequent nor urgent. “Emergency” tasks are rare but urgent.

Consider any product you own and anything you do with that product. Which are more frequent? Which are more urgent?

As a design tool, we can use this analysis to lay out a user interface or physical controls. Obviously, the primary tasks are what a device is “for.” Controls for auxiliary tasks can probably be minimized, or hidden. And we need to support emergency tasks by keeping in mind that they’re so infrequent that a consumer may need to relearn them every time.

An interesting aspect of thinking this way is that you can use it to analyze the changing relationship of consumer and product. Take a product out of the box, and everything is “infrequent”–you’ve never done it before at all. And many of those tasks seem urgent as you learn how to do them. But over time, many of those tasks move into “auxiliary” mode; only a few become primary tasks.

We use this line of thought to understand the difference between the experience of using a product on day one and the experience of using it on day 100. It’s a very useful way to characterize the changing nature of interaction with a product, and to give consumers a coherent experience no matter when they engage with a device, service, or business.

Question for you: what’s the different in the experience of a new user of your product and and expert?

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