Don't listen to your customer, watch them

One of the best advices, for creating great products and services, I've heard is: "Don't listen to your customers, watch them". Asking people what they want or would prefer often gives irrelevant answers. When watching how people behave, there can be noticed patterns, that will tell how they would like things to work. Their verbal answers might tell a different story.

Watching people's behavior will guide to the sources of what people really are missing. It's quite common to say different things than actually do. People try to be smarter than they really are and try to give creative answers to the question about how would they like things to work. Watching the behavior, is for that reason, more important than just listening.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen