Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become

Google brilliantly reinforced its “innovator’s ask.” Its innovations asked customers to become people who expected immediacy. Google’s UX economics made search faster and easier. Users could literally do more in less time. Speed enabled and accelerated how Google transformed customer expectations. A Pavlovian would say Google conditioned its search

Successful innovators don’t just ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different.  Facebook asks its users to become more open and sharing with their personal information, even if they might be less extroverted in real life. Amazon turned shoppers into information-rich consumers who could share r

Google continuously improves the quality of its search by improving the capabilities of its searchers—and vice versa. As Google’s searchers grow smarter and more sophisticated, so does Google. Win/win.

Innovation is about designing customers, not just new products, new services, and new user experiences.

Align customer vision (what you want your customers to become) with user experience (what you are asking them to do).

Microsoft’s innovation asked for real commitments of time, thought, and effort. What did Windows innovation upgrades and updates ask customers to become? Experts. Microsoft’s complex—and complicated—flow of feature and functionality innovation asked customers to become students of Windows. Was this a stupid ask? Absolutely not. It created commitmen