Successful Customer Interview Techniques for Wearable Product Design
Channel: Nearsoft, Inc
Date: 2015-03-16

How do you know if people will wear your wearable device? Should you just ask them? Well, that will work to a limited degree. For the best information, you need to keep asking, testing, and demonstrating what your wearable could do. 

But more than just shoving your wearable theory in people’s face, understand what individuals are doing in their daily life and how can you do the least to disturb that process while also enhancing it in a way that they’ll eagerly want to participate.

We’re at the infancy of trying to understand how people want to interact with an Internet-connected wearables system and what they want to get out of it. You can’t just ask people what they want, because they simply don’t know.

“People don’t tell you exactly what they want. They’ll tell you what they think they want,” said Peter Burnham, senior interactive designer for Fjord in his presentation "A Designer's Guide to Wearables" at the WearablesTechCon in Santa Clara, California.

In this video, I speak with Burnham and his colleague David Hindman, an interactive design lead at Fjord.
 
Most users, if you ask them what they want, they’ll focus on the fitness aspect because they think that’s what they should be telling you. But a wearable can be so much more. A wearable can be social. It can enable banking and entertainment. 

Most users simply don’t understand the full wearable ecosystem and its capabilities to tell you what they want.

To get around that “not knowing” issue, Burnham says that at Fjord they create a current state to understand where the customer is today and then they create a future state customer journey to determine the path they’d like users to take.