5 consumer trends from Microsoft’s head of thought leadership: Kelly Jones

Consumers want technology to give them what they want, not what engineers think they ought to want. That was the message from Kelly Jones, a consumer trends researcher at Microsoft who spoke Tuesday in Dumbo.

“Technology has been based on engineers building what they want to build,” she said. That’s something she’s trying to change.

Jones and her team put together several reports every year where they do qualitative research with consumers to identify what they want, what trends are and to work with engineers to deliver those devices or other products to them.

Jones spoke at dd:Outpost, as part of its monthly Coworking and Executive Office Hours series, in cooperation with Bing. On one of the coldest days of the year, the group was small but the conversation was active.

She highlighted five trends she’s seeing in her conversations with consumers all over the world:

• Consumers are realizing that their data is valuable. They want control over it, but they are also willing to exchange it for useful services or goods, or sell it outright.
• Technology should enhance the real. Consumers expect technology to feel more and more natural to use and interface better with the real world. One place that businesses haven’t caught up: even if they make it easy for consumers to learn about their products online, there’s no relationship between that online work and the in store experience.
• Devices should know when to engage with people. Jones called this “Intelligently On.” So, for example, your phone should know not to ring when you are napping and your tablet shouldn’t send you chat requests in the middle of watching a movie. Or, for example, your PC shouldn’t automatically reboot when you’ve left it to run a long upload.
  
• Data should enable discovery. “Data is making the world more predictable, but we are finding that consumers don’t want it to be so predictable that they lose a sense of magic,” Jones said.
• We need curated insights from analytics. Consumers are now drowning in data, too, and what they want is insights and information from that data. So, perhaps, if a consumer has lots of self quantification instruments, is there a way that software could be used, for example, to tell a person that he or she does more impulse buying when they’ve had too little sleep?

Jones is a Boerum Hill resident and Ohio native who has worked for Microsoft for eight years. She has always worked for the company from New York. She and a coworker have a book forthcoming from Wiley Publishing, Multi-Screen Marketing: The Seven Things You Need to Know to Reach Customers Across TVs, Computers, Tablets and Mobile Phones.

She explained that the book will push creators to look first to the why of devices rather than getting caught up in the possible functionality. Look for it this Spring.