Giving customers agency

Textile 2024 week 10 note

As designers generally work on things that don’t yet exist, how design fits into a company often times depends on the product strategy. There are many ways to discover and adapt product strategy and one of these is the often unjustly maligned market research survey. We’ve all gotten the emails, the nags, the pop-ups and promptly closed or deleted them. Whether they be for a theme park you went to six years ago that you somehow can’t bear to unsubscribe to, to software you actually use, most don’t pay much attention to them. Yet, they still exist and according to Delighted, 20% respond to them. Why? The answer is agency. All humans like to feel like they have a voice and customers, whether for tacos or enterprise software are no different. They can serve as an excellent way to inform what people want though, and this is probably the most important part of the design process. So why not get involved? As designers, we’re taught to empathise, and this is just yet one more way we can.