Gathering features

You obviously cannot do a Kano study without a list of features you want to test.

Although the Kano model is not a tool for discovering customer needs, discovery is too important not to pay any attention to it. A good discovery will lead to better outcomes of your Kano study.

Product and services are solutions to customer needs. Never assume you know what your customers need. As Michele Hansen says in Deploy Empathy (2021), your time is too valuable to create things people don't want.

Uncovering customer needs

To reveal customer needs, don't just ask them what they want. Start with observing customers in a context relevant to what you're trying to do. Don't ask them whether they'd like feature X or Y, just observe and let the ideas come to you or try and find out what influences their (dis)satisfaction. If you can't observe or talk to customers, try and look at things from the user's perspective.

Observing the customer

Big insights can come from observing your customers.

Although it's assumed it is not very deeply rooted in truth, the following tale of milkshakes does get the point across.

Some years ago, the academic and business consultant Clayton Christensen was summoned by a fast-food chain to help them sell more morning milkshakes.

The fast-food company’s marketing department had been asking customers what the ideal milkshake would be (“more chocolatey, creamier, chunkier, chewier, cheaper?”). No matter how they changed the milkshakes, sales didn't improve.

Clayton Christensen was asked to help because he had been evangelising the Jobs-to-be-Done framework. That framework is built on the idea that customers "hire" a product to make progress in specific circumstances. People buy and use a product because they believe it will help them get something done. So from a product owner's perspective, understanding why a customer hires a product is the key to that product's success.

A good practical introduction to the theory is When Kale and Coffee Compete by Alan Klement.

Christensen had his team observe the fast-food chain's customers. It turned out that a lot of morning commuters bought a milkshake on their way to work.

The team found out that the commuters “hired” the milkshake to take away the boredom of the commute and prevent a hunger attack at 10 AM. Other alternatives, like bagels, donuts or fruit were suboptimal: they either crumbled, caused sticky fingers or were finished too soon.

(By the way, this is a very important insight of the JTBD framework: the real competition is not similar products from other brands, but alternative products that help get the customer job done. That’s one of the reasons why I don't always consider marketshare a useful metric).

So the milkshake gave commuters something to be busy with for a while and prevent a hunger attack at 10 AM without making a mess of the car. And it did a pretty good job of it. The consultants' hypothesis was that the milkshake would even be better at its job if it took commuters longer to finish it.

In terms of features, this means for instance that the thicker the milkshake, the longer it would take to finish the milkshake. Commuters would feel better about it than before, so they'd be more inclined to “hire” it (i.e. buy it). And that was Christensen's advice: make thicker milkshakes.

Mr. Christensen telling the milkshake story in his typical deadpan style.

Interviews

If observing customers in their habitat is not an option, one-on-one interviews or focus groups are a very good substitute.

Ponnam et al (2011) conducted four focus groups and four one-on-one interviews to determine what features of a fast-food restaurant they should include in their study. It's interesting to see that they gathered the same information from both methods:

Students who had previous experience in visiting fast-food restaurants were invited for a focus-group discussion; they were then asked to describe their most satisfying and dissatisfying experiences [...]. The focus group exercise yielded 11 drivers of satisfaction. Further, four participants, differing in their levels of patronage were independently interviewed in depth and were further coded by a s different researcher; this resulted in a similar set of drivers of satisfaction.

Be aware that the way you conduct your interviews and focus groups depends on what you want to find out. Interviews and focus groups are used to find out two very separate things:

• What people are trying to achieve while using your product or service;

• What the existing drivers of customer satisfaction are.

The shape of your interviews is determined by what you want to find out. Conversely, what you'll find out is determined by the shape of your interviews.

If you want to test new ideas for (improving) your product, find out what your customers are trying to achieve. Use the interview or focus group as a proxy for observing your customers. Do so by asking them about their motivations and their goals and how they go about fulfilling them. It's up to you to use this information afterwards to think of new ways to help them get things done. These ideas are then the basis for your Kano survey.

On the other hand, if you want to know how people feel about existing features, but you don't know what features to use in your survey yet, talk about the product as much as you want. The interviews serve as a means to find a list of existing drivers of satisfaction to use in your survey.

Make sure you listen though. The goal is not to correct people. "Everyone is the expert of their own experience, even it isn't factually correct" (Hansen, 2021). Your goal is to understand how people experience your product. That'll help you decide which features' perceived values you'd like to see quantifiably categorized with your survey later on.

Adopting the customer perspective

If you don't have time to go out and observe users, try and adopt their perspective. Find the weeds that you need to pull out and look for spots where flowers would be nice. To discover what turned out to be very succesful "tiny wins", Github's Joel Califa asked himself and his team:

• What are our product’s most frequently used flows?

• What about those flows is frustrating? What regularly takes up time or cognitive load? This could be an extra click or an ambiguous component.

• How frustrating are these moments? What is the sum of time or frustration that fixing each of these small things will save? How many users would be affected?

• Will it be noticeable? Will it be shareable? Will it create joy?

Just by looking at things through the eyes of the customer will uncover pain points and ideas for improving the lives of your customers.

Don't just ask customers what they want

There is little chance that the fast-food company’s marketing department would have thought to ask its customers whether they’d like their milkshakes to be thicker.

But more importantly, it is highly doubtful that the morning commuters themselves would have realized (let alone expressed) that thickness was such an important feature of their milkshakes.

The hidden and unexpressed (but very real and most valuable) customer needs are discovered by observing customers, not by asking them what they want.

Even if you can't talk to them, just putting yourself in their shoes will uncover latent needs. Github's Joel Califa remarks that "[...] the issues we solved with these changes [...] were almost never reported [by users]". And yet, "[h]undreds of people were ecstatic when we added [these features]".

"But I don't have the time or the money!"

Customer research can seem daunting and it's easy to just decide to drop it. But look at it this way: even talking to one customer is better than talking to no-one.

In their study of the Indian fast-food industry, Ponnam et al (2011) used a combination of focus groups and one-on-one interviews to "elicit drivers of satisfaction".

Students who had previous experience in visiting fast food restaurants were invited for a focus group discussion; they were then asked to describe their most satisfying and dissatisfying experiences in fast food restaurants and their minimum expectations from fast food chains. By the end of the fourth focus group, researchers had saturation of information and hence the focus group exercise was called off. The focus group exercise yielded 11 drivers of satisfaction.

Further, four participants, differing in their levels of patronage were independently interviewed in depth and were further coded by a different researcher; this resulted in a similar set of drivers of satisfaction.

As this study demonstrates, four focus groups and four one-on-one interviews were enough to have "saturation of information". The same patterns kept emerging and they had their list of features to pour into a Kano survey.

Other research shows that to get good results, you don't need to hire specialists or spend weeks and weeks in customer discovery (Griffin and Hauser, 1993). Their findings show that:

• One-on-one interviews are more cost effective than focus groups in eliciting needs;

• 20-30 interviews are sufficient to get 90-95% of the customer needs;

• It’s best to have multiple analysts or team members read and interpret the raw transcripts.

You and your team can perfectly do this by yourselves; you don't need to hire external specialists. It's even better to do the research yourself, as the Griffin and Hauser study states that

it might be more cost-effective to replace "qualitative experts" with a greater number of less-experienced, but trained and motivated, readers. We have observed that the use of product-development-team members brings the added value of team buy-in to the data and greater internalization of the "voice" for later design work. Such ancillary benefits are lost if the team relies on outside experts to interpret the data.

Create features starting from the customer need

Start the design of your features only when you know the customer needs you want to cater for.

Customer needs are the best springboard for creative thought. Were you on Clayton Christensen’s team, you would have been wondering how you might increase the amount of time commuters were occupied with their milkshakes. Joel Califa's team was wondering where they could remove user frustration.

Starting your creative process with such questions will unlock the most imaginative and useful ideas.

Increasing the milkshake’s viscosity was one answer, but you might think of other solutions too: thinner straws, larger cups or extra bits of fruit that sometimes get stuck in the straw could all keep the commuter busy for longer too.

I won’t go into brainstorming methods, tools for lateral thinking and creativity boosting models here. My experience is that you should just choose a method that you feel good about. Use a method that fits the context. More importantly, make sure the people you work with are capable of creative thought. I haven’t seen a single method that can unlock the imagination of unimaginative people.

Just always remember to start with what the customer wants to achieve. Then ask yourself how you can help them get the job done and how it can be done quicker, faster, cheaper, in a more enjoyable way and with less frustration.

Steal from the competition

There is very little chance that your product caters for a need that no other product is catering for. If there’s no competition, there’s probably no market either.

Competitors are a very valuable source of features to include in your study. Be sure to broaden your concept of competition. If you’re McDonald’s, it’s not only Wendy’s that’s competing with your milkshakes. Substitute products (like a banana, a bagel or even the paper) are competitors for the morning commuter’s job of eliminating boredom too.

Try and match the features you find from analyzing the competition with the job customers want to get done.

Don’t only look at the eye-catching features or the features that are being emphasized in the marketing copy (“Now with more chocolate!”). Also study what these competing products have in common. That will give you an idea of what the market believes are basic customer expectations. Your Kano study is an opportunity to test that belief.

Your Kano study will also point out where you can gain an advantage. Some competitors will surely be dropping the ball and spend too much effort on features you know customers just don’t care about.

Adding obvious features

In 2021, a group of researchers did a Kano study on the quality of transportation services at mega events (Chen, 2021). One pair of questions in the study read:

How would you feel if clear information were provided about the transportation services?

and

How would you feel if the information about the transportation services were unclear?

Surely, nobody would want information to be unclear? Why would the researchers include such an obvious feature?

Everyone at the transport company will probably agree that clarity of information is a necessary attribute of their service.

But when is clear clear enough? Is it ever clear enough? Should the company invest in mobile apps, integrations with map services like Google Maps, an open API, more ubiquitous signage? Should it keep looking for new and better ways to provide information to travelers?

The answer depends on how the feature determines customer satisfaction. Will travelers be satisfied as long as what they consider the norm is met? Or will increasing investments in providing information also increase satisfaction? In other words, is it a Must-Be feature or a One-Dimensional feature? The answer to that question impacts the evolution of your product and the trade-offs you make.

Remember that a Kano survey is not about finding out if a certain service attribute is desirable or not. It’s about determining what Kano category the attribute belongs to. And that may be less obvious.

If clarity of information turns out to be a Must-Be attribute, investments above a certain level will not contribute to higher customer satisfaction. If on the other hand, information clarity is a One-Dimensional attribute, the transport company will have to continuously invest in clarity of information. Merely matching expectations will not be enough.

When you’re thinking of excluding a feature from your Kano study, think about how obvious its Kano category is. More often than not, you won’t be able to tell, and you’ll want to ask your customers.