User Need or User Want - We still need usability

At Christmas, I wrote about usability testing products no-one really wants - and why it is still important to ensure that such products work as well as possible. This article is about a product we all seem to want, but few of us really need - the car satellite navigation system.

There is a tale (probably apocryphal) of the Black and Decker executive, who changed the fortunes of the company thirty years ago by declaring that their customers wanted ‘holes in walls' not electric drills. He argued that they could only succeed in selling more drills by focusing on that underlying customer need - emphasising what you could do with the tool, rather than marvelling over the product itself.

I am not sure that this still holds true. In fact I am certain that it doesn't. I think people (well I suppose I mean mainly men) actually want toys (sorry I meant to say tools) as much because they are attractive and fun as for their functionality. Certainly I believe in the importance of letting user needs drive design, but B&Q and the like seem to be full of people, who want to buy tools rather than use them.

Perhaps this also explains the phenomenal growth in popularity of satellite navigation in cars. As a committed technophile, of course, I already have one, but I have noticed that I do not seem to need it nearly as often as I thought I would. In order to provide some real data for this article, I have just conducted a straw poll in the office. Apart from me, only one of the six I asked actually had one. Everyone else would like one, but, when I then asked how often they actually drove to places they did not already know well, all but one admitted it would be rare - less than once a month (and that includes the two of us who have one).

Yet the shops are full of them at prices from just over £100 to several hundred pounds and unlike the tools, I suspect a lot of the customers are women. I guess we have all experienced the frustration of getting lost so a sat nav seems like a ‘no-brainer'. But how many other expensive products do we buy to use so infrequently? And since we use them infrequently, and whilst performing the difficult and demanding task of driving (despite the instructions not to use whilst under way) making them usable is certainly worth while.