Customer Research - Don't ask questions

Steve Jobs is famously said to have quoted, "People don't know what they want"!

More recently, Guy Kawasaki, talking about twitter, asked "10 years back if you asked people about a tool where they could send 140 character messages to the "web" or "crowd", how would they react?"

The context: Steve Jobs was saying ".. until you show it to them" and Guy Kawasaki was saying ".. create a prototype and offer people to use"

Insurance Implementation

I wouldn't talk about the value of "agile development" or of "Minimum Viable Product", but share an implementation in the area of Health Proposition:

Insurance Product launch lifecycle is typically between 6 to 12 months, not counting several boardroom discussion rounds.

Still, many features in the plan remain unutilised despite this research and the expectation of value they add. Examples might be Specialist Second Medical Opinion and Preventive Annual Medical Examination

We went ahead to launch a set of 5 services, previously unavailable to our market/ customer after very minimal research. The key test were around the following:

1. User Experience - Launch a few different user interfaces to different set of customer "test-groups"

2. Key Feature - While with common theme, proposed a different service as the Top Key Feature

3. Choice - Tested scenarios with a different set of services to the customer test-groups

RESULT: Within days, through actual live testing, we could recognise the services and user journey that was engaging people.

Opinion: Unless immediate, customer's don't buy what they "need" but what they "like". This is a challenge in Insurance Products - We are offering solutions they may not need TODAY.