Connecting our information about customer desires with our designs is difficult. If it seems simple, we probably missed something. In the realm of product development, the most challenging and often the riskiest part of the design process is deciding precisely what features or functions our designs must have to out-compete the other options presented to our customers.

Gathering voice of the customer (VOC) data is important and helpful for determining the competitive aspects of our designs, but that too is challenging. We have a limited opportunity to borrow customers’ attention to answer our questions, and those answers rarely resolve into a clear and focused picture. Often, they point to many criteria, not a few.

Trying to understand customers takes us out of the realm of engineering and into the realm of psychology. In my own research into customer behaviors, I have realized one thing without doubt: Professors of human behavior often disagree with each other. As an engineer, that’s not what I want to learn about interpreting customer data.

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