If you don’t know your customers, you’re screwed. You need to know how people interact with your products, and more importantly, how they do it in a natural setting. Apparently Jobs knows this pretty well. According to a story from ZURBlog, Jobs would occasionally park himself outside of his local Apple Store, in the bushes, to watch how customers interacted with his products.
I’d do it too if I was Jobs. It probably comes off sounding a little bit crazy, but an Apple Store is pretty much a giant focus group. We’ve heard previously that Jobs doesn’t think much about focus groups, but when you have that many people walking into your stores on a daily basis, it would be hard not to tap into that untapped information. Jobs clearly has insight into consumer behaviours—his company just swept the 2011 Readers’ choice awards over at Engadget. So, he’s doing something right.
Article Via Cult of Mac