🚗 Charged Up and Locked In - What My Car Taught Me About Customer-led Innovation
The one where my kids get trapped
When you buy an electric car, everyone wants to know what it’s like. How’ve you found the switch? How long does it take to charge? Is it cheaper? Quieter? More fun? Less fun? And, the most important question - how long does the battery last?
I can answer all of these questions easily - it’s great, it’s £20 to ‘fill up’, it’s fun, it’s quick, and yes, I’ve managed to drive halfway across the country without coming to a slow standstill on the side of the road. I love it.
It does something else that I didn’t expect though, something which I think shows the importance of using your own product before releasing it into the world, the importance of understanding how humans work, not just what your technology can do.
It repeatedly locks my children in the car.
Now, depending on your view on children, you may see this as an annoying fault or a handy beneficial feature. You’ll have to guess my view. But here’s what happens.
The designers have created a super-smart feature that senses when the driver’s weight is on the driver’s seat. So, when the driver (me) gets up, the radio switches off and the car shuts down. I close my door, and the entire car locks up. Smart, huh?
Well, maybe smart if you’re flying around the Ehra-Lessien testing track or have the car set up in a lab. But when you have a family of four involved, things seem to work differently:
The car pulls into the driveway
I, having been yelled out for an hour, want to exit the car as quickly as possible
The kids, having spent the last hour wanting to know precisely when they will get home and telling me how bored they are, decide that now, actually, they’re not in that much of a hurry to get out
I open the door and leave the vehicle, happy to let them stay there
The car senses my weight shift - maybe my mood, too - and locks the doors behind me
Excitable chaos ensues
There’s plenty more of these features, too.
When it’s cold outside, the aircon automatically starts at 23 degrees instead of 19. Clever, right? Well not really, because when it’s cold outside, I’m clambering into the car wrapped in coats, hats, and gloves. A few minutes at 23 degrees, and my car is veering left and right as I desperately try to de-robe. If I’m happy with 19 in the summer, why not the winter, too?
The lane-assist is a wonderful feature on the motorway, gently nudging the steering left and right to keep you central on the road. It’s less useful on residential roads with cars routinely parked on the roadside. You casually pull out into the middle to pass the parked cars, and the car violently jerks you back into the lane, presuming you’ve made some awful steering error and, in fact, you wanted to smash directly into your neighbour’s van. (This feature can, mercifully be turned off. But sadistically, resets to ‘on’ every time to restart the car.)
And then, we get to the lack of buttons, a hot topic within the car design community. In my first car, a barely-functioning Ford Fiesta, I know where all of the buttons were by memory. Slight left - aircon dial. Middle - temperature. Far left - where do I want the air.
In our car, twenty-five years of design brilliance later, we have a beautiful big touchscreen, full of all the information and data you could wish to see about your journey - but ridgeless flat buttons to touch or side your fingers along. The problem is, you have to look at them to know where to touch. And if you’re looking at that screen, you’re not looking at the road. And looking at the road is a fairly crucial part of successfully driving a car.
Building on my last article, it’s not enough to ask customers what they want, and build that. And it’s not enough to see what technology exists and just build that, either.
In fact, it’s not even enough to use your product yourself, because you may be a very different person to your customer (‘Treat customers how you’d want to be treated’ is one of my least favourite bits of advice).
For truly customer-led innovation, you have to immerse in your customers’ lives and behaviours, observing them using the products and services you’ve designed, and seeing all the nuances and quirks that neither you or they had considered.
That way you’ll spot the problems before your customers have to deal with them - and you might save a few family arguments, too.