Need and want

Businesses often don’t need what they think they want…

We want a cool website with all the latest gizmos and a splashscreen to entertain our customers.

What you need is a website that helps your customers get to the useful and helpful information effectively.

We want an award winning marketing campaign to remind our customers about us.

What you need is to start giving a damn about your customers.

We want a specialist to bring in some innovation.

What you need is to start treating your people with respect, and to allow them to be really themselves at work.

We want a hot logo to help us stand out.

What you need is to BE different and BE authentic. Actions speak louder than image.

One comment on “Need and want”

1. Andrew Boyd said:
   

   Hi Zern,

   and the correlation is quite true: that what people truly need is not what they want. Not that it is what they don’t want, but it may be outside the box of “what I want”.

   An example from my own work: many a time I’ve heard “We want a user manual”. What they are saying, in real terms, is that they need effective information support to match their system (where system could be a business process or a piece of software), and that it needs to be delivered in a culturally sensitive way (i.e. to fit into the way that they Do Things Around Here).

   I’d go so far as to say that identifying the true need and providing a truly needed solution is the heart of successful design.

   Cheers, Andrew

   
   25 May 2007 at 3:53 pm

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