Getting Kinetic
NO. 02 · AUGUST 11, 2026
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Hi— When my kids were little, they didn’t know how to ask for what they needed, but they sure knew how to let me know when they didn’t have it. That’s the way it is with user research sometimes, isn’t it? That’s what my note is about this week. When something needs to change, you don’t have to announce it. Don’t schedule a Zoom meeting about it. Don’t draft a slide deck or redesign your website. Just make the change—and execute. It almost always goes better when you just meet the need—talking about it is not as productive as doing it. PS: Well, I got very little feedback on the first letter. What I did get was this: wow, it was long. Noted. | |
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A TENSION
People don’t care why you do what you do. Just that you do it. As my boss taught me back when I worked at Hilton: Nobody ever closes the tab on their browser and says, “Gosh, that was a great experience.” They’re just glad they got what they needed (or didn’t). And that reinforces the brand (or doesn’t). The strategy is doing its job when it’s invisible. | |
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FROM THE WORK
We wrapped up a round of voice-of-customer interviews for a client last week. One word came up in nearly every conversation: automation. Here’s the catch: this product shouldn’t be automated. Not with rules, not even with AI. The human input is the product. What’s happening is they’re asking for the wrong thing. Setup is the hard part—the configuration, the data input, the first few hours of figuring it out. What they call automation is really “get me past all this so I can get to the part I came for.” They say automation because automation is the word people have for this is too much work. I think the answer here is not a feature called Automation—it’s a setup that doesn’t feel like a second job. And if we get it right, they’ll just be in the product doing the thing they came to do (and they’ll stop asking for automation). | |
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PUT IT TO WORK
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If you’ve got an example of a customer asking for the wrong thing (and what the right thing turned out to be), I really would love to hear from you, — JD and the Simple Focus crew | |
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