Hidden in Plain Sight

How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers

Jan Chipchase, Simon Steinhardt

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780062125699
• eBook ISBN: 9780062125712
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Hidden in Plain Sight by global innovation consultant Jan Chipchase with Simon Steinhardt is a fascinating look at how consumers think and behave.

Chipchase, named by Fortune as “one of the 50 smartest people in tech,” has traveled the world, studying people of all nations and their habits, paying attention to the ordinary things that we do every day an how they effect our buying decisions. 

Future-focused and provocative, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers illuminates exactly what drives consumers to make the choices they do, and demonstrates how all types of businesses can learn to see—and capitalize upon—what is hidden in plain sight today to create businesses tomorrow.

Chapter 1

Crossing State (of Mind) Lines

You and I may never have met before. I have no idea where you are or how you’re consuming this book. I will, however, venture a guess: wherever you may be reading this, you’re not doing it in the shower. If I’m wrong, well, bravo for you. But if I’m right, my question to you is this: why aren’t you in the shower right now?

It may seem like a dumb question, but in design research it’s exactly the sort of foundational inquiry that allows us to get at the core of user behavior. Unless you’re designing wedding rings or pacemakers, there’s no such thing as a 24-7-365 user. My colleagues and I spend a great deal of time thinking about touchpoints—the times and places where users would likely be interacting with the product or service we’re designing—and triggers that would prompt users to act in one way or another during those times and in those places. These factors can highlight new opportunities to serve unmet needs, or to better tailor products and services to fit the circumstances in which customers use them. But in order to understand touchpoints and triggers, we have to take into account the boundaries that separate use from disuse—the border between doing and don’t-ing.

Let’s take this mind-set to a café, where most people would look around and see a bunch of people seated at tables drinking coffee, chatting, and typing on laptops. An inquisitive researcher, however, might ask why none of them are in the restroom, why anyone would even want to go to the restroom, or even whether it would behoove management to provide free diapers for customers.

Questions like these, however dumb they may seem, allow us to outline the parameters of user behavior—and human behavior. We ask these questions because we know that behavior isn’t simply dictated by the laws of nature and the laws of states, but also by cultural norms, social contexts, interpersonal relationships, personalities, and perceptions. When we look at any behavior, even something as mundane as a trip to the restroom, we can uncover all sorts of factors at play. Our goal is to put the parameters of behavior into perspective. And in order to paint the proper picture, we need to put it in the proper frame.

The Frame Job

Over the course of a corporate field study, it’s common to collect a great deal of information from participants about the minutiae of their lives: from what time they get up in the morning to the last thing they do before closing their eyes at night; where and with whom they hang out; where they go shopping; what they wear; why they prefer one brand over another; with whom they communicate and why. Some of it may be quite valuable, some entirely trivial, and we use a variety of techniques to help us figure out what matters. When we move from collecting all this information into analyzing and synthesizing it, we are looking to do two things: make sense of our observations and then reveal patterns and trends that we believe are accurate enough to share with our clients.

To a client or outside observer, design ideas that aren’t presented within a research-based, real-world framework can seem arbitrary. For organizations that were weaned on quantitative market research, it’s not enough to be inspired—they want to be able to trace that inspiration back to its source.

A multilayered synthesis process runs throughout every field study. During an interview, the questions evolve from those that build a foundational understanding to ones that include more inferred assumptions. As soon as we finish an interview or other data collection session, the team members assemble in the nearest café and review the data we’ve collected, working to build a shared understanding of what we thought was relevant. Data, like milk, is best consumed fresh; the longer we take to analyze it, the more likely we are to lose the thread that connects it to its original meaning. At some point in the day the team heads back to our “mission control,” most often a room in a hotel, guesthouse, or home, where the walls are papered with notes and ideas. Before leaving the city, while we still have access to our local team, we like to spend a full day sifting through the data. Later, back at the studio, we might spend a week or two in a project room surrounded by the data pinned to the wall on giant foam boards, where the team systematically processes it through different lenses.

At this stage, we need to begin organizing the data into a cohesive framework, but the right one—one that creates order out of the chaos of data, setting all the little statements, events, and outcomes to a story—is rarely easy to find.^* A good framework helps the researcher accomplish several things: it tells a big truth, substantiated by all the important data and contradicted by none of it; it often maps behaviors across space and/or time; it captures the different behaviors across a range of individuals, taking into account idiosyncrasies without overgeneralizing them; and it creates a narrative around causes and effects, so that reasonable assumptions can be made if anyone tries to throw a “what-if” at it. If someone can glance at it, understand it with minimal explanation, incorporate it into their worldview, and then use it to contemplate new scenarios, then it’s working.

If there’s such a thing as a default framework in corporate research, it’s the customer journey map, which provides detailed information about each event in a customer’s typical day, diagrams how she moves from one event to another, and identifies all the touchpoints where she may use the product or service we’re designing. Customer journey maps tend to be very precise in their documentation and technical in their appearance—many boxes connected by many lines. They’re useful for building a basic level of understanding, and certainly no one would accuse them of being arbitrary, but reading them can sometimes feel like a mechanical process.

There are numerous alternatives to the customer journey map, but there is one in particular, less commonly used but phenomenally useful when applied skillfully, that can bring the diffuse spectrum of almost any human behavior into focus: the threshold map.

Threshold mapping allows us to map out “default” conditions—the normal state a person experiences a majority of the time (for example, most people feel clean enough throughout the day that they won’t drop whatever they’re doing and hop in the shower if it’s available)—and then understand what happens when a person crosses the line into an alternative condition. Often, the feelings that people experience as they approach or cross a threshold lead them to think and act differently.

Design studios, workshops, and laboratories are good at testing and exploring what their products are capable of and what they can withstand when users put them through the wringer of everyday life. Most warranties are predicated on “normal wear and tear,” and you can bet a team of researchers spent a good deal of time defining “normal.” But increasingly companies around the globe are looking to inform design with greater insight into the makings of their users, not just their products, and what drives use in the first place. And in order to understand behavior, we need to get out of the lab and into people’s natural environs.

Often, when people cross a threshold from one state into its alternative, or when they avoid crossing that boundary by taking an action to steer themselves away from the borderline, it’s a matter of maintaining standards of acceptability and appropriateness. For designers to understand what lies within the boundaries of acceptable use and what lies outside those boundaries, they need to understand the contexts in which things will be used, and the range of likely conditions that will change that context in some way.

In the same way that a testing laboratory can help us understand the boundary between normal and extreme (and probably out-of-warranty) use of a product, design research helps us understand the boundaries of normal behaviors. And one of the strongest ways of communicating normal and outlier behavior is through a threshold diagram.

Threshold Mapping 101

Thresholds can teach us a great deal about the ways people make decisions based on their physical and mental states, and what they do to maintain or regain a particular state. To give you a quick rundown of the basics, I’ll walk you through a simple example by mapping a threshold you manage every day, all the time: hunger.

Imagine, for a moment, a day in your life as a horizontal timeline, with 12:01 a.m. at one end of that line and midnight at the other. Mark off when you get up and when you go to sleep (and assuming for now that you won’t wake until morning once you’re asleep). So that we have some context, plot the different places that you go during the day, and the time you spend there: home, your commute, work, the café where you like to lunch, the grocery store you shop at on the way home, and then home again. On top of this, plot the moments when you eat, whether a meal or a snack. The vertical axis, in this case, indicates your level of hunger. Now plot three lines along the timeline: your level of hunger, as it varies throughout the day; a peak threshold, above which you may be so well sated that you can’t even bear the thought of another morsel of food; and a trough threshold, below which you would be too hungry to function. The area between the two thresholds is your comfort zone, and in normal circumstances you’ll do what it takes to stay within that zone.

Unless you like to eat to the verge of stomach rupture or fast until you’re just about dead from starvation, these thresholds are not absolutes. Moreover, they are not straight lines. They shift up and down throughout the day as you navigate various contexts, with the trough rising as you recognize the need for brain food before a big exam or sinking as you climb into bed too tired to address the rumble in your midsection.

Your hunger level is of course not static, either, gradually veering toward the trough as you go an increasing length of time without eating. If you’re proactive, and conscientious about staying within your comfort zone, you’ll see the trough coming and eat something as you near it but before you reach it. You’ll also stop eating before you reach the peak. It’s a neat, simple pattern that anyone can visualize.

But it’s also not a realistic one for most people. There are many moments where the normal rules won’t apply: you wake up late for work, pick up breakfast at the café next to your office, and give in to the temptation to buy one of their famous bagels; you’re stuffed from lunch but it’s a coworker’s birthday and you feel social pressure to accept a slice of chocolate cake; or you leave work late and find yourself at the grocery store with a shopping cart full of comfort food, due to a combination of hunger and all the tantalizing smells of fresh, sweet dough emanating from the bakery. Your own comfort zone probably shifted just from reading that last sentence, although the extent of the shift will likely depend on whether you’ve just eaten.

The thresholds change even more drastically when you consider an extreme event like devout fasting for Ramadan or ritualistic gorging on Thanksgiving. All those external forces can make a mess of what might otherwise be nicely systematic behavior, but the beauty of the threshold map is that it can take those moments into consideration, plot them and their outcomes, and still provide a clear picture—no matter how jagged the three lines get.

We can also map different threshold diagrams for different types of people: how would a hunger threshold diagram differ for a twenty-year-old athlete versus a forty-five-year-old office worker? How would it differ for a successful dieter versus a compulsive eater?

It’s a simple exercise but one that can deliver a large payoff, revealing both a richer understanding of what people are and are not doing, what triggers them to go outside their zone of comfort, and more important, why. The format also allows an audience to rapidly absorb the basics, and supports an incredible level of depth and storytelling, particularly around the exceptions.

Exceptions to the Rules

For many people, the comfort zone is an ideal, normalized state, and like anything else that people call “normal,” it comes wrapped in a set of social and personal assumptions that can reveal someone’s worldview. It also inherently suggests that there is an “abnormal,” a state that lies on the other side of some boundary, a state that may be considered extreme, where one might not venture by choice. The abnormal state is most likely an uncomfortable one (in our example feeling bloated or excessively hungry), and someone who falls into it is likely to try to get out of it as quickly as possible. Like a product testing lab exploring what will trigger a product to break, understanding what it takes for someone to move to an extreme can be just as revealing. In my experience, companies have a reasonable understanding of what is normal but struggle with the extremes, which means they don’t understand the tensions that pull normal in different directions.

Just think: How uncomfortable do you get when you haven’t checked your email for an hour? How many minutes do you have to spend at the gym before you decide it’s okay to have a cupcake later on? How long does a shirt have to go unworn before you decide to give it away? How annoying does that half-broken thing in your house need to be before you’ll finally get around to fixing it? Understanding the exceptions and the behaviors needed to bring you back into the comfort zone often reveals little things that might turn out to not be so little: a tweaked interface for prioritizing missed communication; a new pricing model for using exercise machines; how recycling used clothing can free up room in the cupboard and trigger new purchasing behaviors; or a distributed model for sharing DIY tools in the neighborhood.

Such thresholds are fundamental factors in decision-making, whether we explicitly set them or not. Sticking to them, however, is another matter, and a great deal of research has gone into uncovering how and why people miss their marks, so to speak.

Casinos are especially adept at coaxing patrons out of their comfort zones and into risk-taking by plying them with alcoholic drinks, free meals, and massive doses of oxygen. Psychological experiments on willpower have shown that hunger, lack of sleep, and decision fatigue (the mental toll exacted by extensive decision-making) can all derail otherwise steadfast commitments to self-discipline. Consumer psychologists tell us about how seemingly innocuous distractions, from sound snippets to lighting, promote impulsive, irrational buying habits. In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the authors argue that people can be coaxed into making better (or at least more classically rational) decisions through “choice architecture,” creating defaults and subtle encouragements that suggest one direction of action without compelling it. These are but a few of the countless examples of research on the pliability of ordinary behavior.

What does it all have to do with threshold mapping? Design research is very good at exploring the many different variables that impact changes in behavior, and the aforementioned examples suggest that those parameters are constantly shifting, albeit in ways that can often be anticipated. A threshold map, whether derived from quantitative or qualitative data, allows you to account for these parameter shifts—even when there’s no noticeable change in behavior. It can also highlight the times and places where a person is right on the cusp of change and therefore most susceptible to manipulation. So the next time you’re in cupcake avoidance mode, be mindful of not only how hungry you are, but also what’s going on around you that could bump up your trough threshold and change your mind before you know it. And if you’re the one selling the cupcakes, just look for the hungry, tired, and mentally weary passersby and give ’em a nudge.

So Fresh and So Clean

Let’s go back to the earlier question: why aren’t you in the shower right now? Looking at it through the lens of thresholds, the simple answer is that you’re within your comfort zone, somewhere above the (trough) threshold of discomfort. But what would it take to push you below that threshold? And what would it take to push you above your peak threshold, into the zone of maximum confidence? In one study my team and I conducted on behalf of a large, upscale personal care brand, we used these questions to frame our data and show the client how its customers really went about their daily grooming.

In several large Asian cities, we interviewed people at great length about their grooming habits and all the motivations and consequences that play into those habits. We learned about their home lives, their social lives, their love lives, and their work lives, and the pressures they faced in each. We learned when they brushed their hair and when they brushed their teeth. We learned about the difference between taking a bath and standing in front of the sink, the nuanced difference between the dynamics of a morning shower and an evening one. We traveled their morning and evening commuting routes. With all that information, we were able to outline a typical weekday and weekend day for each participant, and then cluster the participants into different archetypes based on their dominant motivations for grooming: getting a date, climbing the corporate ladder, managing stigmas like body odor or bad breath, and so on.

Each archetype had distinctly nuanced habits. The date-seeker might have spent upward of an hour in front of the mirror before hitting the clubs on a Saturday night, whereas the ambitious worker might have popped a breath mint every time the boss walked by. Another archetype, the carefree coaster, might not groom at all until he sensed that his unkemptness was actively repelling people. They all took steps to stay within their own desired comfort zones, but the dimensions of those zones looked very different when we plotted them out.

In threshold mapping, we use the term “comfort zone” loosely to describe the area where a person maintains the status quo for everyday life, going about business as usual, which typically means not engaging in the behavior we’re studying. We could just as well call it the “peace of mind” zone or the “generally okay” zone, because ultimately the barometer for behavior is one’s own perception.

With the grooming study, we found that the desire for cleanliness had generally little to do with physical comfort and almost everything to do with social acceptability and self-confidence. Many of the participants expressed little interest in any form of grooming while they spent extended periods of time at home alone. The majority of their grooming efforts at home came in anticipation of social encounters; their efforts outside the home generally took place at times when they developed some anxiety about impending embarrassment and felt the need to correct course somehow.

This qualitative data suggested that the trough threshold for grooming exists at the point where someone is unwilling to engage in any social interaction (or some specific interaction at that point, like a meeting or a date) without first freshening up somehow. The zone below that threshold i...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Crossing State (of Mind) Lines
• Chapter 2: The Social Lives of Everyday Objects
• Chapter 3: Riding the Waves of the Past, Present, and Future
• Chapter 4: You Are What You Carry
• Chapter 5: Calibrating Your Cultural Compass
• Chapter 6: A Matter of Trust
• Chapter 7: Finding the Essence
• Chapter 8: The Great Tradeoff
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Eight Principles of Design Research
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher