Mind Reading: Seeing Needs Users Don’t Articulate

A session at SXSW Interactive 2012

When your product is facing serious competition, knowing what unmet need still exists is crucial to planning your next move. But in surveys you find that everyone is reasonably satisfied with all of the key features in your competitor’s products and they do not perceive that their experience could be better than it currently is. So how do you identify opportunities that seem not to exist? In this session, using Bing’s insight development practices as a case study, we will discuss techniques for gaining deep understanding of and empathy with customer’s pain to spur product innovations. We will share insights that we’ve identified that point to broad cultural shifts in how people think about knowledge that impact what is perceived as trustworthy and what is complete information required to make important decisions. We will share both how we were able to identify these needs and specifically what these needs are in an effort to encourage thinking about how to better meet them. This session is sponsored by Bing.

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Leslie Feinzaig

Senior Business Planner, Microsoft (Bing)

Leslie Feinzaig has a passion for people – consumers, customers, users, decision makers – those that are at the heart of every creative human endeavor. In her tenure as a strategy consultant, as well as a marketer and product planner in the consumer goods and technology industries, Leslie has observed, interviewed and surveyed thousands of people by conducting more than 100 consumer research studies in dozens of countries around the world. She’s brought her deep insight, empathy, and user understanding to topics ranging from the consequences of obstructive sleep apnea on marriages, to the smoking habits of Jamaican grandmothers. At Microsoft, Leslie spent three years researching the online information and entertainment space. She is currently a Senior Business Planner at Kinect for Windows.