When you’re designing a product or service it’s easy to believe that making it the best in the world is what gives you a competitive advantage. But the thing about ‘best’ is that it’s subjective. ‘Best’ isn’t determined by you, it’s your customers and users who decide. The truth is that people don’t fall in love with the best product. They fall in love with the product that delivers the experience and the feeling that they want.

What makes the apps we use daily, the restaurants we keep going back to and the brands we wouldn’t dream of switching from a success? It turns out that great products and services are born from obsessing about the user’s feelings and frustrations, from understanding the problem to solve, for whom and knowing why it matters to them. Great innovations and experiences are not made by focusing on form and functionality without caring about the context in which people with an actual problem will use and benefit from them.

People don’t want a better knife, they want the butter on their bread.

Image by Tito Perez.