There's been a bit of an upheaval in my little corner of the world (Flanders, Belgium) about a government proposal for a digital deposit system for cans and plastics.
The way we do things now is that we separate plastic trash from general trash, and put the plastics in a designated refuse bag. That bag is collected together with the other trash by the municipality.
A lot of plastic trash still litters the environment though. A deposit system, where you get a small amount of money in exchange for depositing a plastic bottle so that it can be recycled, is in the works. There’s already such a system in place for glass bottles. You just return empty glass bottles to a collection point at the supermarket, and in return you get the deposit money.
The retail and packaging industry have come up with a plan to introduce a digital system for collecting plastics and are lobbying the government to implement it1. The idea is that you scan each plastic packaging you want to dispose of before you put it in the refuse bag. If you do that right, you get the deposit money.
“The user experience is the most important part of it all”
Naturally, a lot of tech companies are eager to be part of this proposed digital collection system. In one article about the proposal, one of the interested companies’ CEO was quoted with saying that “the user experience is the most important of all”. In his Twitter bio, that CEO states his purpose as “the relentless pursuit of simplicity”.
Music to our ears. Or is it?
The proposed digital collection system doesn’t feel right. If we were to implement it, we’d introduce a lot of friction to the process of disposing of plastic waste. Scanning every plastic bottle before you drop it in the bin is a big task, not even taking into account technical issues2. Disposing of trash would become a much much bigger chore than it is today.
The industry initiative starts from the idea of having people scan their trash, and only afterwards customer-centric tactics are introduced. The industry — personified by the CEO mentioned above — didn’t think about all of this from the perspective of the user.
It “persists in imprisoning itself in the narrow grip of its tight product orientation”.
That quote isn’t mine, I lifted it from Theodore Levitt’s seminal 1960(!) article “Marketing myopia”. In it, Levitt writes this about gas stations:
Let us start at the beginning: the customer. It can be shown that motorists strongly dislike the bother, delay, and experience of buying gasoline. People actually do not buy gasoline. They cannot see it, taste it, feel it, appreciate it, or really test it. What they buy is the right to continue driving their cars. The gas station is like a tax collector to whom people are compelled to pay a periodic toll as the price of using their cars. This makes the gas station a basically unpopular institution. It can never be made popular or pleasant, only less unpopular, less unpleasant.
The solution Levitt proposes is as simple as it is radical:
To reduce its unpopularity completely means eliminating it. Nobody likes a tax collector, not even a pleasantly cheerful one. Nobody likes to interrupt a trip to buy a phantom product, not even from a handsome Adonis or a seductive Venus.
Should the digital collection system be implemented, we’ll be exposed to ludicrous advertising about the joys of scanning plastic bottles.
But the handsome Adonises and seductive Venuses will never make the chore feel lighter. People will be pining for the good old days where they could just chuck a bottle in the bin, without having to balance their smart phones in one hand, a bag in the other and a range of bottles ready to be scanned lined up on the kitchen counter.
Kano as a conduit for existential questions
If we were to design a Kano survey about the digital collection system, we should first use it to ask how customers feel about having to scan each plastic bottle before disposing of it in return for a small fee.
When it turns out most people dislike this, we should think of other ways of disposing waste and collecting money in return. It’s no use developing features for a product nobody wants in the first place3.
Questioning the reason why your product exists is frightening. It’s existentialism pur sang: we’re at odds with nature (the perception of value of our product is something we have little control over). Existentialist philosophy basically gives you three ways out:
Quitting
Refusal to accept reality
Acceptance and acting accordingly.
You, as a product developer, are not of the kind to quit easily. Quitting is only an option when all other options have expired.
Sadly, many refuse to accept reality, and push their agenda’s forward4. This leads to even bigger disappointments later in the product's lifecycle. It will also mean of lot time, energy and money will be spent trying to subvert the course of nature. (The gas station Venus and Adonises cost a lot of money, and the only reason they exist is to subvert the natural dislike of having to pump gas).
Of the three choices you have when faced with an existential problem, the only positive one is to accept reality. Acting accordingly in the case of product development means finding out why people dislike your product idea.
Practical note: don’t conflate levels of abstraction
If you want to face the abyss and ask existential questions about the value of your product, do so in a separate survey.
Don’t conflate questions about product features with higher-level questions about the purpose of your product. If you do mix them up, the answers you get will be of no use to you.
Suppose you do a survey that contains these questions:
How would you feel if you would have to scan each plastic bottle before depositing it? And how would you feel if you didn’t have to do this (but still collect the deposit fee)?
and
How would you feel if the app automatically recognizes whether a plastic bottle has been used? And how would you feel if you had to take a picture that is later confirmed by us?
Suppose Mrs. Smith does not like the idea of having to scan each bottle. Her reply to the first question would categorize the whole idea as a “dislike”.
But say Mrs. Smith is very interested in the field of AI, and likes the idea in the second question. But she may also be thinking: “I still wouldn’t use it because I don’t want to be scanning each bottle in the first place”. Her answers could be all over the place, from “must-be” to “dislike'“.
Mrs. Smith’s answers to your product features would be worthless to you, because you won’t really know how she feels about the feature itself. Are her answers taking into account that she doesn’t like having to scan each bottle or not? The decisions you make based on the outcome of your survey may be completely wrong.
When designing your Kano survey, don’t mix levels of abstraction. Ideally, make a different survey per level of abstraction.
Suppose you’re building an app for a local cinema. There are at least three levels of abstraction here:
The meaningfulness of having an app
The general features of the app (payment, reservation, programme, …)
Details of each feature.
First, gauge whether the existence of an app would be valuable to the cinema’s customers. If that’s the case, ask about the value of the different features (this will also inform you app’s architecture). Then dive into the details of each feature perceived as valuable.
Make sure your survey questions are in the same level of abstraction. Doing so will deliver the most valuable insights for your product roadmap and prevent a lot of wasteful effort.
The reasoning is that the retail industry would not have to invest in plastics collection points. Some also suspect the packaging industry wants to track people’s consumption behaviour.
The technological component of digital waste collection is daunting. Apart from hand-wavy technological wishful thinking, not a lot has been said about this yet.
One company was adamant that fraud could be prevented with AI-powered vision that detects whether a plastic bottle had been opened and emptied before it’s thrown in the bin. Good luck with that.
There are hints of cronyism in this whole digital waste deposit saga…