How do consumers interact with technology?

Paul Allen Smethers and Alastair France have spent the last 20 years improving products for some of the largest consumer technology companies in the world. Their specialty is in analyzing the footprints of consumers who use technology products—for example, the transactions of a user navigating through a web site.

After analyzing billions of transactions from millions of real users, Smethers and France are able to answer some tough questions: What attracts consumers? What paths are consumers taking? Quite simply, what works best?

The results of these studies are amazing. Consumers behave exactly opposite to how the experts in the industry predicted they would. Smethers and France have built new consumer behavior models to explain these results. When these models are applied to real products, consumer usage usually doubles or triples within weeks.

Five Myths of Consumer Behavior explains these new models and is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs, marketers, and engineers trying to crack the consumer technology marketplace. It retails for $14.95, and you can pick it up at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Borders book stores.

What others say:

The methodology for consumer adoption proposed here has definitely helped us drive service usage and market penetration for Vodafone live!

—Csaba Tarnai, Milan, County Manager Vodafone live!

Read this? I devoured it in two days (interrupted only by the need to sleep). Very specific, but incredibly relevant to anyone creating tech products, like we do at Airborne. Written in a breezy, accessible style (despite its subject matter), the authors’ melding of the standard product S-curve and a broken-up consumer adoption funnel is pure genius. What a find!

—Andy Nulman, President and CMO Airborne Entertainment

It’s been required reading at the office and for good reason. It’s a superb book! Something every marketing student and product designer or engineer should pick up. At only 147 big-print pages it’s a rather quick read but it packs a big punch and does a fine job at outlining core yet often overlooked consumer behaviour principles. In particular, Smethers articulately explains (in plain English) the various phases and stalling points of new product adoption, the barriers to initial use and proper usability, the different types of users and how to approach them, the many costs to the consumer and why it’s so important to highlight a product’s true value.

—The Creative Generalist

Sample Myth:

Myth 5: Consumers want more features

The problem: As an idea turns into a product and starts shipping, its designers and engineers seem to have an unlimited number of new ideas for new features to include in the next version, each feature designed to make the product “more complete.” However, in the eyes of the consumer, the exact opposite is happening. The early users are wondering why the key feature is so hard to use, buggy, or incomplete.

The reality:

Consumers only want a few key features, and they want them to work well.

The Consumer Behavior Bubble Chart enables comparisons of different features or services to determine how many consumers use each feature (Attraction), how much time consumers spend with each feature (Usage), and how often they return to use the feature again in the future (Stickiness).

The solution: Before shipping a product, all you have is your professional training and experience to aid you in designing a product. But once you have built and shipped the product, you have access to a wealth of consumer usage information that can help drive future design decisions. Use this data to tell you where your value really is and focus on continuously improving that value.

Where to buy:

The easiest way to purchase Five Myths of Consumer Behavior is to go to Amazon.com and purchase it online. The retail price is US$14.95.

Barnes & Noble and Borders also carry Five Myths of Consumer Behavior in most of their retail bookstores. Please call your store in advance to make sure it has the book in stock.