Does, "shopper-centric," mean the same as, "shopping-centric?" And does it yield the same results as being, "use-centric?"
...Theodore Levitt gamely observed that customers don’t want quarter-inch drills; they would prefer to buy quarter-inch holes. He advised companies not to focus on products but to concentrate on developing specific solutions to specific problems or tangible benefits. In other words, don’t talk about the size of the drill but about the flawless hole the drill bit makes in sheetrock.
Such an approach, advanced at the time, is actually quite limited today. In the current business environment, customers don’t care about buying the drill or even the hole; they simply want to decorate their home by putting up pictures.
I took the above block quote from Erich Joachimsthaler's article, Making the Most of Customers, because it gave me pause as to the centricity of my design ideology. In design school everything was User-Centered, and that was enough of a challenge to champion adoption. Now it feels like we've got a lot more to consider.
This piggy-backs another great article I read recently by Eric Bailey at frog design on Change Agency and Transformologies. It brings up a slew of things I want to think and blog about, but my overarching take-away was around the stewardship of technology as designers. It is our duty to transcend aesthetics and enjoyment, to provide an interaction that impacts the aspirational potential for human development.
So, how might we achieve this? What might be a right way to think?
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