Disrupt Your Market, Not Your Users.


Disrupting a market is a great way to gain market share. So companies increasingly focus on how to do things differently in their chosen field. It can yield great dividends, but the innovation is only half the job.

If you change the physical shape or size of your product, do you ensure that you facilitate its use by providing or highlighting ways for users to transport/carry them (this applies equally to small items as well as large)?

If you change the technology in your product/service, do you ensure that your users are fully and easily informed about how it works and acknowledges that users will only upgrade every third iteration and thus will be making a larger leap in capabilities and techniques than the developers?

If you disrupt the distribution system of your market by shifting elements of the purchase process to your user, do you ensure that these elements are as simple as possible for them to take on or do you just leave them wandering the (real or virtual) aisles?

If you add functionality to your product/service, do you ensure that existing users are neither overwhelmed by it nor unable to revert to their old usage patterns with ease (this is not just a technical issue as New Coke so ineptly demonstrated)?

Whether you adopt a low end disruption or a new market disruption strategy, there are many other scenarios that could be added to this brief list, but the base line is this. Disrupting your market is great, disrupting your user experience is not.

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