Deeper Empathy Through Reflection

One of my passions lately is in understanding how we can get deeper understandings of our customers... if we can establish "Deep Customer Empathy", then we can develop better solutions for them. I'm not alone in my recognition that we need to get deeper. Companies are starting to hire more ethnographers and specialists to help bring those understandings to the company. However, that's not enough. Everyone at the company needs to have the empathy, not just the researcher. Matthew May just wrote about this a couple of days ago. There is a WONDERFUL new book on the topic by Dev Patnaik, called "Wired to Care". Both are well worth reading.

To researchers and designers, this stuff might seem like it is old-hat. However, I've found that even researchers and designers don't necessarily go far enough in their investigations. I think an important step, when studying people who aren't you, is "reflecting" what you have heard and seen and how you are interpreting it. The customer can "course correct" you if you are slightly off.

For example, a team I was recently working with was trying to come up with new ideas for a market they hadn't really focused on before - young adults. I had them do some ethnographic research and some interviews, and when they analyzed the data, they determined that the area where the most opportunity seemed to be was in planning for the "mid-term". This market was great at managing near-term events (things in the next few weeks) and very long-term (retirement), but not really the time in between. The team identified a problem around planning for the time between 4 months to 40 years. I then brought some of the participants from our earlier research in to review the insight. Their reaction was lovely. They absolutely agreed on the problem, but they couldn't agree with the time frame. For this market, they couldn't really comprehend 40 years. They corrected the time-span of the problem to 4 months to 10 years...

This was just one of the things they dug into with the customer. But, it illustrates the importance of clarifying and getting deeper with customers. It isn't enough just to observe customers and understand where they are coming from. Since you are filtering things through your own eyes and experience, you should go the extra step to reflect with the customer to make sure you have it right.