Innovating in the Right Direction — What Zappos Taught Me About Designing for Humans

UX Poland 2015 Speaker — Lisa Mumford — Innovating in the Right Direction

Your customers don’t always know what they want — but it’s your job to figure it out anyway.

I want to start with a confession: I was a doodling-obsessed only child who grew up to become a UX designer chasing every pixel like it owed me something. And somehow, that path led me here — to UX Poland, talking about shoes.

Well, not just shoes. About what happens when you take an e-commerce company selling shoes and turn it into a customer experience company that happens to sell shoes. That’s Zappos. And working there changed the way I think about design entirely.

Culture isn’t a perk. It’s the product.

Zappos started with a simple idea — make shoe shopping easy, with free returns for a whole year. But what it became is so much bigger than that. The reason people are obsessed with Zappos isn’t the selection or the shipping. It’s how the company makes them feel.

When you’re designing for a company that puts culture front and center, it changes everything. You’re not just designing screens — you’re designing moments. And the richest design insights don’t come from a whiteboard session. They come from being close to real customers, hearing their actual words, understanding their actual lives.

The most valuable design input comes directly from the source — not filtered through data, but heard from real people in real moments.

Your customers don’t know what they want (and that’s okay)

Here’s the thing about customer research that took me a while to really internalize: people will tell you exactly what they want — but only within the boundaries of what they already know exists.

Ask someone about their TV habits, and they’ll describe their remote control. Ask someone about their commute, and they’ll talk about traffic.

This is where Nest comes in. A professor from the Polytechnic Institute in Milan came and spoke to us at Zappos, and he used Nest as the perfect example of designing beyond the ask. Nobody asked for a thermostat that learns your schedule, knows when you’re driving home, and adjusts the temperature before you walk in the door. But once it existed? Everyone wanted it.

That’s the challenge and the thrill of innovation: designing for the life someone is living, not just the problem they’re describing.

Meet people where they actually are

Think about how people shop today. They’re on their phone on the couch. They’re scrolling in bed. Very few people are sitting at a desktop computer at home to browse and buy — yet so many e-commerce experiences are still designed as if they are.

The gap between how people actually live and how we design for them is where bad experiences are born. And closing that gap — really closing it — requires us to stop designing for the idealized user and start designing for the real one.

At Zappos, we’re constantly asking: what does the experience feel like for the person who isn’t at their desk? Who’s out in the world, shopping on the go? How do we get them what they want — sometimes before they even know they want it?

Innovating in the right direction

So what does it mean to innovate in the right direction? For me it comes down to this:

Know what you’re good at. Keep evolving. And never stop being curious about the person on the other side of the screen — what their day looks like, what frustrates them, what would genuinely make their life a little easier.

That’s not a design methodology. That’s just empathy. And it’s the best tool any of us has.