Your customers *do* know what they want

I had a conversation with an old school friend last night; and we had a brief discussion about entrepreneurship as it relates to IT. He said he wanted to get out of the daily grind, and thought it'd be great to come up with a product and sell it. He was a bit leery, still, not sure about whether he could really "make it".

Having read a number of Paul Graham's fantastic articles I thought the idea was great, but I reminded him of how important it was to make something that your customers actually want. At which point he stated: "I speak to my customers all the time and in my experience they don't know what they want"

At the time I didn't answer. I could see he had a point, but it wasn't the one I was trying to make, and the conversation moved on. But now I think about it I think that he was simply wrong.

What question?

When you ask a user what content they want on their site or ask about styling or layout, you'll frequently bump up against a puzzled look and a lot of hemming and hawing as they try to figure it out. They don't have an answer ready for that and they probably didn't think about it before you asked. Often they have no idea what they want.

Many is the project where the requirements change like a fickle breeze as the scope creeps inexorably onward. It's obvious your customers don't know what they want. Right?

or do they? is it possible you're asking them the wrong questions?

What language?

Since I moved into freelancing, I've been studying up a whole lot more on business. One thing I was surprised to learn is that my customers are actually pretty savvy. They know their business, and they know exactly why they came to you to build their website.

Your customer knows they want a website that promotes their brand to get more customers, or to cross-fertilise their customer-base with their other product-lines, or to act as a tool that is a more efficient/less-expensive way of selling their products.

What they want has to do with their *business* goals, not with the specifics of the technology that will be used to achieve that goal. They know exactly what the goal is and whether they have reached it - and it has nothing to do with font-sizes or table layouts, or whether the "order" button should be on the product list-page or on the product's details-page.

If you don't know what your customer wants - it's most likely because you haven't asked them the right questions. But it's not enough to change what you're asking - you also have to change how you're asking it.

Your customer lives in a different world to you. You live in IT-world, but they live in the world of their business. Your customer uses a language that is different to IT language. They speak in the language of business - with market-penetration, conversion-rates and revenue. They don't operate in the realm of splash-pages, JavaScript or three-column-layouts. Business has its own language, its own way of organising and expressing ideas, and its own way of determining whether or not a set of actions will acheive a required result.

More than your job's worth

If you don't speak the language of business, then you'd better learn quick! These are your customers, and you already know they can't speak IT, and don't have the time or patience to learn. So it's up to you to do the translation service.

After all, that's your job. It's why you get paid the "big bucks" right?

It's your job to learn how to ask questions in such a way that your customer understands what you're asking and why. To translate their requirements into IT-jargon, and your questions back into business-speak. To express their choices in such a way that it gives them enough information to actually make the decision that you are asking of them.

Do they want flash or XHTML? does it matter to them if you use table or CSS-layouts?

No - what they want to know is "will this process of online ordering appeal more to my customers than the other, or will it be too difficult to learn?", "will my customers be able to find my products on this website, or will they get confused and I lose a customer?", "how can I use this software to give me better tracking of purchasing so I can promote or cross-promote appropriately?".

Tell them that if you place the "order now" button on the product-listing page, it could speed up the ordering process, at the expense of creating visual clutter. Explain that new users might get confused by this, but that it could aid frequent users to get through the process quicker. It then becomes a business decision: ie "are we aiming this site at new customers, or our returning/frequent customers?" - which is a much more meaningful basis for their decision-making.

So...

Translate your requirement questions into their language. Explain how their choice will impact them and their business goals. Explain the benefits in a way that they will understand. Make sure what you ask them leads back to their goals - not yours, and you'll find that they actually have a very good grasp of what they want.