The experts tell me that, when it’s time to baby-proof my house, my husband and I should get down on our hands and knees and crawl through our home at “baby height” to find any risks that may be present for our child. I did this the other day. It was actually eye opening because it gave me a totally new perspective.

It then occured to me that this is precisely what we should all do with with our customers if we're truly interested in improving their experience with our brands. In doing so, we can better position ourselves to innovate and even co-create with our customers in a manner that builds brand loyalty and market share.

To better illustrate this point, please crawl with me, for a moment...

As some of you know, in addition to being an experience architect, I am the mother of a seven month old. He has been incredibly sick for ten days now. As a result, my focus has not been on working, writing or tweeting … but on changing, bathing and hydrating a feverish, restless baby.

In the course of doing caring for baby, I had a myriad of less-than-stellar product experiences. These prompted me to ask:

• How many Huggies and Pampers brand or product managers have had to work in a daycare for a week?
  
  
• How many babies have the Aveeno Baby or other product managers at Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson actually had to wash using their product(s)?
  
  
• How many purple-stained onesies have the makers of Pedialyte had to clean?
  

And I wonder, if these individuals actually got these assignments, if they’d actually design:

• Diapers that readily discourage leakage up the back of baby
  
  
• Easy-grip, non-tip containers designed for one-hand use, which naturally force product to the bottom of the bottle so that it's easy to access and dispense through a no-leak dispenser.
  
  
• Non-staining flavored electrolyte formula for babies

This certainly seems intuitive - but perhaps I'm some kind of weird customer anomoly. All of these product improvement/innovation ideas are 100% actionable... and produced simply through repeated exposure to product use. This proves that customer listening, improvement and innovation don't require magic powers or extensive and expensive customer research.

If this formula is true:

...then how important is it that we experience our products as our customers would - rather than going from third-party research, our gut, or just plain ignorance. This would seem the only way to ensure the "aspirational brands" (brands we want to create) match up with our actual brand recognition.

The point: If you're not "crawling with your customers", you are missing out on some important perspective.

My brain is full of posts. However, it seems the longest distance these days is between my head and the keyboard.

For the past few months, I've been very heads down managing the strategy for a portal integration project for a B2B company in the high tech space. It's a complex company, with a complex audience and complex products.... and untangling that all to create something simple has been the challenge for our team.

So that's why I just haven't been able to extricate myself long enough to post, or read much. Amazing how easy it is to fall behind.

Last month, however, at the request of my friend Kelly Goto, I did take the time to pen one article she asked me for. The article is a personal story that runs parallel to Kelly's new gotoreport issue dedicated to the topic of becoming "UNSTUCK". The series primarily focuses on companies making the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0.

Recently, Kelly and I played a good amount of "brain tennis" on the "STUCK" issue. As we chatted, we continue to marvel at how "STUCK" most companies -- or most individuals truly are. It happens to us, too. Whether we get mired in old legacy systems while moving to Web 2.0, or stuck in a culture that can't effectively innovate, implementing new models for customer-centric commerce.... or loosing ourselves to create a new, satisfying professional or personal lives...lots of us live stuck.

The article in this month's gotoreport is my personal story of becoming unstuck. Rather than post it here, I thought I'd link you over . While you're there, check out the other terrific articles on Web Usability, Design, and moving into a Web 2.0 development environment.