the outcome driven blog

Shouldn’t you be able to trust the people who buy your products and consume your services to tell you honestly about how they use your products and services? It’s a well known observation that we say one thing and do another. Don’t trust your users? That’s pretty cold hearted wouldn’t you think?

A great example of this phenomena is the consumption of ecologically grown food. When polled, shoppers exaggerate their habits and will almost always try to appear more green (intentions) than they in fact are (outcomes). We want to be more ecologically minded and we want to project that intention. It’s just that the intention and the actual doing are two separate things.

Are we as users delusional? No, we just have different expectations to the use of our products than we realize. We intend to do one thing but actually do another.

This every day phenomena was measured recently at the Aalborg Zoo in Denmark. A team of researchers interviewed 250 guests on their way into the zoo as to their expected use of the facilities. Then they equipped the subjects with a GPS tracking device and recorded their movements inside the zoo. To surprise of the researchers, the zoo guests said they would do one thing and then did another. When confronted with the evidence that they spent more time at the playground and the ice cream kiosk than the actual zoological exhibitions, the zoo guests were in disbelief. They all felt that they had spent the time at the zoo watching animals as was their intention with the visit.

This doesn’t surprise me. We already know that we have the best of intentions with any activity concerning time spent with our children. We want to be a certain way for our kids and spouses. We set high expectations to the quality and amount of time we spend with them. The only problem is that we have a hard time meeting these self-imposed goals. You can say that our intentions cloud our outcomes.