Focus products on the situation - not the customer

I have just started reading the Innovator's Solution - and this was one of my big learnings from the first 3 chapters.

Taking the example of a cafe serving chocolate milkshake - the authors illustrate how focusing on the situation (When job does the chocolate milkshake product do for people and how can it do this job better?) rather than the customer (Who buys chocolate milkshake and what kind of milkshake do they like?) can make a big difference in how you target the product.

Analysing the product based on the latter case could result in a profile like this:

Target: Typical customer is middle aged working men

Competitors : Other coffee shops / other drinks

Observation: Middle aged men like chocolate milkshake with more milk

How to improve: Add more milk.

The first case could look like this:

Job 1: Alleviate boredom during morning commute, and provide something filling to last till lunch.

Competitors : Other stuff eaten during commute  - bagels, bananas, sandwich.

Observation: The job requires a food that is not messy to eat, takes time (to last the commute), as filling as possible, easy to carry (people generally have work suitcases in the other hand), easy to consume (many people drive)

How to improve : 

Chunkier (slow consumption), fruits or something (element of surprise to counter boredom).

Job 2: Give kids something to keep them quiet for the rest of the day

Competitors : chocolates etc.

Observation : The job needs something that is easy for parents to say yes to, is smooth (kids find it easier to drink), comes in smaller quantity

How to improve:

Smoother, package as add-on with kids meal, smaller containers.

Which approach do you think will yield better results?

Infinite scrolling and assumptions

You must have heard of infinite scroll (http://pinterest.com/ , Google is a good example. See how there is no pagination). I always thought pagination was stupid when you could do something as cool as in infinite scroll.

Looks like Etsy did an A/B testing on infinite scroll.. So how it works is they roll out infinite scroll to a section of the users and stick to the old pagination for the rest of the users. And then they collect all kinds of relevant data like clicks, purchases etc of each user group and compare statistics to see if there is any significant difference in usage pattern.

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

So looks like infinite scroll had a negative impact. 

What is more insightful is the bit about assumptions.. ie. Users want more results and users want faster results. Fair assumptions to make.. what you would call obvious but they didnt have any positive impact individually.. And together, they had a negative impact. If they had tested it before they might have reconsidered implementing infinite scrolling! And there is no way you could know this before without actually getting empirical data. 

So let's be mindful of our our "obvious" assumptions and take a step back once in a while!