He was in good company. Steve Jobs once famously told  Business Week: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. In short, when your goal is to create revolutionary innovations, speaking to customers in the early stages of design is pretty useless. There’s a kernel of truth in this, but only because people are limited in mentally accessing and verbally expressing their needs. The trick is to offer people the right kind of tools that will allow them to express themselves. 

As people are notoriously bad at predicting their technological future, traditional market research will not suffice. Consumers are well able to express their preferences in relation to products that currently exist or that present only minor innovations within an existing frame of reference.
However, whenever a dramatic innovation presents itself -a T-Ford instead of a horse- people’s imaginations generally fall short, as they tend to focus on fancier versions of the technologies they are familiar with.

Carolyn Marvin, a communication scholar at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, already noted this 25 years ago in her book  When Old Technologies Were New. In such cases, we have to dig deeper in order to access people’s latent needs. Behind Henry Ford’s alleged ‘faster horse’, we can, for example, identify a latent need to travel longer distances with greater speed.

In this respect, psychology offers us a useful toolkit of structured methods to explore people’s perceptions at a deeper level - focusing on emotions and behaviours in order to understand what it is that moves people (no pun intended), beyond the limitations of introspection and the poverty of language to express oneself. Henry Ford, too, seemed to appreciate this, when he wrote: “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.”

Wijnand IJsselsteijn is professor Cognition and Affect in Human-Technology Interaction