The trouble with customers – charming, truly lovely people that they are – is that they rarely live in the right tense. They buy in the present but dream in the future, all while clinging to the past like a favourite jumper. Most companies respond with a scatter of features and frantic appeasement, tinkering and tweaking constantly. But designing for the customer as they are today is like fitting a child for the suit they’ll wear on their wedding day. Sweet, perhaps. Pointless, absolutely. They are unaware that they are a moving target. That times change. And quickly.
At The Office of Omar, we prefer to design for the customer they’re quietly turning into; the one who’s grown slightly wiser, slightly busier, and far less tolerant of delays, clutter or nonsense. This future customer isn’t a speculative hologram. Life moves fast for us all. They’re simply the same person with a few more experiences under their belt and a sharper sense of what matters. So we ask: “What will this person expect in six months, and why not give it to them now?”. And we build that.
This isn’t futurism with tinfoil predictions. It’s not a crystal ball. It’s just refusing to be hypnotised by the noisy present. Trends come and go like bad pop songs; small shifts in behaviour tell the real story. People streamline, simplify, harden their preferences. They outgrow things they once thought essential and cut out the rubbish. They discover they quite like things that actually work. These aren’t trends, they are habits settling into place.
And so we build for that slightly more focused next version. When customers eventually arrive at it, they think we’ve been terribly intuitive, when all we did was pay attention to their direction rather than their footprint. The Office of Omar isn’t chasing novelty for novelty’s sake. We’re crafting what people will thank us for later; the thing they didn’t know they’d need until they became who they were already becoming.
