Ask a person why they bought a “blue Acura RX”, and the answer you’re likely to get is one that the person has created in their mind, a sort of cover for instinctive decisions made following intrinsic rules of fundamental human desires.
It is sort of like that old saying – “the heart has reasons that reason doesn’t know about”.
There is actually a proven psychological principle that sort of validates the Ford quote – it is called the Peril of Introspection Problem and it’s the result of some great work by UVA professor Timothy Wilson… asking people to think about what they want causes them to change their opinion of what they want. In fact, it screws up their ability to recognize what they want. To prove this he did a very simple experiment called the Poster Test, and it goes something like this:
He had a bunch of posters in a room and brought in a group of college students and told them to “pick any poster you want, take it home and hang it up”. Then he brought in a second group of college students and told them to “pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, take it home and hang it up.”
A couple of months pass and he called up the students and says, that poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it? Do you still have it hanging on the wall? The kids in the first group, the ones that didn’t have to explain their choice, all still liked their poster. The kids in the second group, the ones that had to explain their choice, now hate their poster. Not only that, the kids who had to explain their choice all choose a very different poster. So, making people explain what they want causes them to change their preferences, and change them in a negative way. It causes them to gravitate towards something that they actually weren’t interested in.
Now, there is one little detail here – there were two kinds of posters: there were these impressionist prints and then there were some posters of kittens hanging on a bar with a slogan that read “Hang in There Baby!” and the students who had to explain their choice overwhelmingly chose the kitten poster. The students who didn’t have to explain their choice overwhelmingly chose the impressionist painting – and all those with the impressionist poster were still happy. Why is that?
Why is it when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate towards the least sophisticated offering? It’s a language problem, right? You know in your head you like the impressionist painting, but you have to give an explanation for your choice and you don’t have the language to do that. What you do have the language to say is that, “well, I chose the kitten poster because I had a kitten when I was a kid” or “college is really stressful, I chose the motivational poster to help me get through the long nights of studying”. So, forcing someone to explain a choice when they don’t have the vocabulary to explain it automatically shifts them to the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice.
People don’t know what they don’t know – so, asking people what they want in a website (or car or toothpaste) will yield answers analogous to the “faster horse” from the Ford quote.
That is why so many design, process improvement or innovation projects fail – they are built on a foundation of false assumptions and misinformation.
Getting user feedback is one step in a comprehensive design effort – the tricks are how you go about involving the users, how you gather their feedback and how you get beneath the surface of what they tell you.