User Centered Design, Voice of the Customer, Ethnography. Whatever you want to call it, including the customer in a meaningful way is an undeniable trend in product development. To create products and services that people want to use, innovation teams need to include the customer in the process. Done right, including the actual customer in the design process creates better products and services.

Simple. Right?

Maybe. People can’t always tell you what they want, so you’ll need to observe their behavoir, instead of just asking them.

If you’re designing products for teenagers, your job may have just gotten a little bit easier, thanks to PBS’ Frontline. They recently aired “Growing Up Online” about how teenagers are behaving on the Internet. If it’s your job to create products, advertising, marketing, or services for teenagers, then you need to watch this show. While going into the negative side of an always connected culture, it accurately portrays life for today’s connected teenagers. If you don’t understand this behavior, then you’ll fail to create products, services, media, or whatever that fits into their lives.

While a nice overview of how kids are connected, the program could have benefited more from Danah Boyd, a rational voice in how kids are connected online. Perhaps the most interesting counterpoint is an interview with producer Rachel Dretzin on the Manic Mommies Podcast. A few important insights from Dretzin that weren’t emphasized, or didn’t make it into the Growing Up Digital:

• While sexual predators online are real, the vast majority of kids know how to deal with them. If sexual preditors are your sole focus as a parent, your doing yourself a disservice by missing the larger picture.
• Paying attention to what your kids are doing online in high school is too late. Middle school is the most important time to instill safe practices.
• While Dretzin didn’t say this directly, really what we’re talking about here is basic media literacy and polite behavior.

One of the ideas touched upon, but was never really articulated, is that teenagers really don’t realize that this is a worldwide broadcast medium and that anyone can see what you’re doing. The piece left me with a sense that teenagers don’t really grasp that. They seem behave as if it’s only their peer group that’s looking in.

It’s important to discuss the behaviors and possibilities that the Internet, cell phones, and video games bring to modern culture in general and teenagers in particular. I fear that the slant on suicide and provocative behavior will do more to derail pertinent discussion than encourage it because it feeds into the common stereotypes of who’s online. These choices by the filmmakers I believer cloud their larger intent of creating understanding and intelligent discussion about technology that’s not going away. As Danah Boyd says in the update to the program (available in video online):

We can turn our backs and say, "This is bad, we don't a world like this." But, it's not going away. Instead of saying this is terrible. Stop MySpace, stop Facebook. Stop the Internet... It's a question of us of how we teach ourselves and our children to live in a society where these properties are fundamentally a way of life. This is public life today.

And it’s not just kids. Parents are changing as a result of the technology, many times brought into new behaviors because of their children. For example, industry insiders talk about an uptick in SMS text messaging among the 40+ crowd because that’s how they keep in touch with their teenagers, who all have cell phones, but can’t let them ring during school.

And it’s not just kids in affluent New Jersey Neighborhoods. According to Yahoo!’s Conexión Cultural/Connected Culture report, “Hispanics care deeply about connecting with each other and their culture and sharing their cultural pride. They engage with technology more than the general population.” Indeed, according to the report, Hispanics are almost twice as like to text message, take photos, email, and download ringtones than the general population.

I’ll leave the meaning of the meaning of that for another time…