The danger of making assumptions

23 September 2009

By Misia Tramp

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I heard recently about a team from Google who spent the day interviewing people in Times Square asking them ‘what's a browser?’ This was in an effort to understand and improve the customer experience of Google's own Chrome browser.

In the end fewer than 8% were able to describe what a Web browser is. Most conflated it with a search engine.  Here’s a sample of the interviews:

We’ve all made assumptions about how something will be done or what will happen and then been frustrated because things turned out differently.

Shortcuts in understanding lead to confusion and frustration. But it’s easy to make an assumption because we think other people think like us and do what we think is logical. Understanding the basics of what something means to a consumer can be one of the most fruitful approaches to generating insight.

It’s great to see Google going to back to basics and challenging assumptions about something as fundamental this.



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