Point: When forecasting, keep in mind that simple signs can have a deeper meaning if you take the time to look.

Story: At the Cultivating Intuition: Effective Forecasting in the Face of Rapid Change workshop preceding the World Innovation Forum, forecaster Paul Saffo described how to watch for signs of the future. In 1991, as he and his newlywed bride were driving to Mendocino County for their honeymoon, he saw a new road sign that was so intriguing that he turned around, drove back, and took a photograph of it while his exasperated bride waited. The sign simply said, “End Emergency Call Boxes.” But the sign told Saffo of both the near-term future and the long-term future. First, the literal interpretation of the sign told Saffo that he and his wife were on their own. If they had any problems, they couldn’t expect to quickly reach the authorities for help. Yet fear of being incommunicado was not why Saffo stopped at the sign.

Second, and more crucially, the sign indicated to Saffo that people’s expectations had changed. Why would the California Highway Department think that such as sign was needed? Prior to the 1990s, no one expected to be in constant communication. But now, the advent of the solar-powered call boxes meant that people expected more.

The sign was part of a series of long-term changes in communications. Only a couple of years later, the sign was gone because the call boxes extended all the way to the Canadian border. Low-cost communications enabled almost-universal coverage. About a decade later, the call boxes themselves were gone, because everyone had cell phones. Yet that sign triggered Saffo’s thinking about communications and how changing technology led to changing expectations and future changes in technology.

Action

• Look at signs and signals in the environment. (Paul recommends carrying a camera at all times to snap pictures of these signs)
• Examine the deeper meaning of those signs — what do the signs say about the changing expectations of consumers and citizens?
• Consider how your future products and services can meet those changing expectations

Point: Use technology to get real-time, full-time feedback from users

Story: Designing new products seems like a guessing game: which features do users want? In the early days, engineers had to guess. Then came market research: asking people which features they’d like to have or which they prefer from among the choices. Of course, users often have difficulty articulating what they want.

Next, some companies hired ethnographers to observe users in action. Software maker Intuit, for example, sent software engineers to watch how users tried to use accounting software. Intuit’s QuickBooks succeeded because its developers had watched users struggle with traditional accounting software and solved the difficulties they were having.

Other companies built usability labs, which have the advantage of measurement but are in controlled settings. Ethnographic techniques and usability labs improve upon market research, but they are expensive and can only watch a small sample of users for a short time.

Now, technology lets companies go one better. Software companies who host their applications in the cloud can see what customers are doing – in real time, all the time. They can see which features really get used and which don’t. They can notice if users hit the “undo” button frequently, which suggests that the feature isn’t doing what users expect it to do. Sam Shillance, co-creator of Writely, found that what users of his word processing tool wanted most was a way to let several people edit a document together. (The Writely app was bought by Google and is now in Google Docs). Finally, as new types of users adopt the product or as new uses arise, developers can continue to adapt their software from the stream of feedback of usage patterns.

Action

• Think about how you can put more of your product or service? on the web or in cloud media so that you can watch user behavior.
• Look for evidence of frustration (e.g., use of “Undo,” help requests, problem reports)
• Watch which features users use first, and keep those simple. That will make your product easy to adopt and will reduce first-use frustration.
• Improve the functionality of the most-used features.
• De-emphasize (or rework) the least-used features.

For further information: The Netbook Effect by Clive Thompson