For companies offering consumer products, innovation is key to unlock new value for consumers and stay relevant among the competition. But when does innovation turn from impressive to intimidating? Particularly for habitual product users, sudden and large changes can be overwhelming. Users may fail to recognize the additional value from the new features, or find that they disrupt their existing habits. How can companies determine and sustain an innovation velocity that consistently takes advantage of new technological advancements to maximize potential product value while ensuring that users maintain a strong understanding and comfortability with the product?
This summer, I worked at a BMW dealership as a Genius (aka Product Specialist) where I had the opportunity to learn both perspectives. In my technical training, I learned about the history of innovation in the automotive industry. In my customer interactions, I learned how these innovations have affected customers and their usability - both for better and worse.
My role uniquely placed me in a position to observe hundreds of human-computer interactions. Below I detail encounters that most surprised me, including features that flopped in the automotive industry, and my recommendations for consumer tech products to more effectively balance innovation and user confidence moving forward.
Disclosure: Despite primarily selling BMW vehicles, the dealership where I worked sold many car brands. My interactions with customers reflect the issues I witnessed across the entire automotive industry in many different makes and models, not specifically BMWs.
In my first-ever customer interaction, I had a customer tell me she was ‘too scared’ to use her car. She leaned in and whispered to me, “I think something may be wrong with it.” As a result of her fear, she refused to use the car for over a week! That seemed like a major cause for concern, and I told her I’d look into it right away.
What was the issue? Her primary concern was that the steering wheel was shaking. As the previous owner to a problematic ‘98 Saab with an alignment issue resulting in the same symptom, I was empathetic to her concern. So I took the car for a drive to confirm the issue.
As it turns out, the issue wasn’t mechanical. And it wasn’t even an issue. The shaking was simply haptic lane assist feedback: if you drive slightly out of the lane lines, the steering wheel vibrates to prompt you to make an adjustment. That’s it. It amazed and worried me that a new feature meant to help the user and inspire safety confidence was causing so much distress that it resulted in a refusal to use the product entirely.
Not only was this customer failing to recognize the value of a new(er) feature, its presence distracted from her expected experience in a way that sparked confusion and fear. Distractions aren’t inherently bad; many find this interference to their driving (through lane assist feedback) helpful given that it trains them to drive more safely. However, the positive response relies on the fact that users are able to immediately understand the meaning of the feedback and how they should react. The customer in the above scenario never made this connection, resulting in a negative response and, ultimately, perceiving a larger issue that didn’t exist.
When customers can’t explain why something is happening, they’ll postulate reasons of their own. In the above scenario, a single user assumption was enough to deter product use. And although I was able to provide clarification and resolve the perceived issue, a customer might feel that it isn’t worth the effort to reach out and instead continue in their false beliefs. In this case, the customer may have never touched her car again!
The Genius role, providing customer support, is built into the automotive business model to provide these clarifications to customers. But to what extent should it need to be? How much teaching and clarifying should be necessary, especially for an everyday product? Shouldn’t users should be able to discover and teach themselves these new features?