Go through training to be your customer

We all know that when we aren't our customer, we make design choices that often don't really resonate with the customer.  This can be especially true if you are highly tech savvy and your customer is not.  In some cases, we are designing for audiences that are very discrete and specialized.  How do you design for them?  Well, of course, the standard observational methods and customer research applies.  But, here's a quirky way to get some empathy for your customer -- go through training to become them. 

This example is completely hypothetical, but go with me on it...

Let's say you were hired to design a web application for LVNs (Licensed Vocational Nurses - the ones who often provide bedside assistance in homecare and nursing homes and the like) to teach them standard care techniques and track what they've done with each of their patients for the day.  You've certainly got the opportunity to talk with LVNs, and maybe observe them in their natural habitat.  However, one option that you might not have thought of until now is to go through training to become an LVN.

The thing is, the people who best understand what it's like to be your target customer are your target customer. And, if you aren't them, you could put yourselves completely into their shoes by becoming them.  The interesting thing about doing the training that they've done is that it exposes you to their vocabulary, the things they've been told, and their expectations.  You'll be exposed to how they are treated, and how they see themselves with respect to related professionals.  It can help you really connect with what they think and how they feel.  And, as I've mentioned before, that is the key to understanding what motivates them.  When you have that, you have deep understanding and empathy and the solutions that you design for them are likely to really resonate. 

Deep Customer Empathy Method: Be the solution

Want to understand the relationship between your customer and your product?  Here's a method that might reveal some good insights. Use bodystorming with your customer and have them teach you.  In this case, you play the role of your product. 

Ask your customer to pretend that you are the product.  For example, if your product is a blood pressure monitor, you would be doing the things the monitor does: taking blood pressure, displaying information, etc.  Have them walk through the day and map when they are interacting with you (bonus points if you really spend the day with them as their product!).

Pay attention to the following:

• Where do you sit? 
• When does your customer engage with you? 
• Do others interact with you too?
• What do they need from you? 
• What do you do in your down-time? 
• What aren't you doing that you could be?

By involving the customer, you can learn what their specific constraints and needs are, rather than hypothetical ones. 

By being the product, you can recognize where your product meets or exceeds their needs, and where it falls short.

It might feel silly, but it might also lead you to a deep insight that can be game-changing. 

Get first-hand experience with the task to understand the experience

I've worked with a lot of teams who have been trying to design a feature or product to help people with a particular task. Oddly, I often find that people on the team have not tried the task itself, either with their solution or with any other method. While this might seem strange, let me give you a common scenario that might illustrate how this can come about:

One of the top call drivers to support for a product was around a specific task. A team was pulled together to fix the feature that supported the task. Although this team is quite familiar with the product and the feature, they have not experienced the task for themselves. They do take a look at the feature and decide that there are user interface elements that might be unclear or are probable causes of usability issues. They make some changes and roll out the revised feature.

Sure, you might suggest that they do a usability test to understand what the issues are, or a site visit to watch a customer using the feature... and you'd be right to suggest that. But, a very simple first step is often missing... have each of the team members attempt to do the task themselves.

I was recently working with a team that was thinking about how they needed to change the customer service/support IVR to be successful at routing calls to the right agent. The first thing we did was give the team a scenario and had them call the live phone line to try to accomplish a common task. They came back and discussed their experiences, recognizing a number of issues that they would have missed if just talking with customers or listening to the support representative's conversation with the customer from our side of the phone.

It's low-hanging fruit... it's easy... and, it can give a team a quick hit of empathy for the customer.

Getting first-hand experience with the task is method 4 in my list of 101 methods for getting Deep Customer Empathy, and falls into the "be the customer" category, although it obviously falls far short of actually becoming the customer on the depth of empathy you walk away with.

97 more methods to come...

AIGA D.Talk on The Rise of Service Design

Last night I attended a panel at AIGA on “The Rise of Service Design”. It was a packed room, reflecting the general interest in this topic.

The session was moderated by Josh Levine (Great Monday)

The panelists were:

• Chris McCarthy (Kaiser)
• Hugh Dubberly (Dubberly Design)
• Jamin Hegeman (Adaptive Path)

The key bits were:

· Service Design seems to be a name for Experience Design over a coordinated set of touchpoints (rather than just a single task) and across an ecosystem of people and objects. For example:

o Netflix

o Starbucks

o Hotels & Restaurants

o Nursing Shift Changes (passing off patient care data) at hospitals

· The tools of product design are insufficient for service design. Service design needs to have workflow models and diagrams to make the intangible tangible.

o Our journey map is another example of a service design tool

o Service Blueprint – a tangible artifact for discussion and referral

o Ethnography, Co-design

· A few interesting points about Services:

o Value is derived at the point of consumption.

o The customer helps to create the experience. You aren’t designing the experience, just the scaffold for the experience.

o The focus is on the relationship between things (including people), not necessarily the things themselves (transitions more than destinations)

o The room had the overwhelming feeling that in the future, the winners will be the ones who took service design seriously

Make your life an integral part of your customer's life

We all want our products and services to be important to our customers. So important that they are integral; the customers can't live without them! Since this is our aim, we need to really be intimate with that customer's life. Talking with them is not going to be sufficient... you should live with them.

Think about it. If you were to design something for your spouse or child, you'd know the types of things that would delight them. You understand their lives, their values, their ambitions, the full context and reality of their existence.

So why do we expect to know our customers that well from listening to the complaints to our call center or reading the answers to a survey?

Here's a radical idea for getting Deep Customer Empathy: Live with your customer. Work in the customer's office, or live in their home, or drive in their car. Experience their world through from their perspective.

This might seem like a crazy idea. However, anthropologists have been doing this for decades. Margaret Mead used this method to study adolescence in Samoa. Lego had a team who lived with kids to understand what their lives are like (leading to the revitalization of the company). Read about more companies who've taken this approach in this CNBC article from last April.

This is method 3 in my list of 101 methods for getting Deep Customer Empathy, and falls into the "be the customer" category, although it obviously overlaps in the watch. Why "be"? Well, because it is so close that you kind of brush into playing the part, at least for a time. In fact, that is my challenge... live with them and become one. You'll have very deep customer empathy...

What would living with your customer look like for you?

98 more methods for deep customer empathy coming...

Become the Customer for Deep Customer Empathy

About a year ago, I wanted to understand the big deal about Farmville... it seems that 1% of the world's population plays Farmville. I know that it leverages some of the key components of gaming that make it compelling (check out slide 8 on Byron Reeve's preso), but it still didn't make sense to me how so many people could get sucked into a game about farming. Farming? Really?

Well, to get a clue, I decided to try it out. (In all honesty, I couldn't do the farming thing... I did Cafe World instead, which is the same game design only about running a Cafe). I BECAME the customer. I have been playing for nearly a year and have found many subtle elements about the experience that reinforce my gaming behavior. I have such a good understanding of being a customer that I can easily envision leveraging these elements in non-game experiences to make them more compelling and fun.

What I did was to appease my own curiosity, but I've applied this same approach to product design. When at all possible, I try to become the customer. For example, recently I was working on a project where my customer is a person who needs funding to start a small business. So, what do I do? I ask my friends and family for money, try to get a loan from a bank, from Lending Club or Prosper, and look broadly for ways to find cash. This gives me some direct personal experience with the customer's experience.

As a method, it isn't as powerful as solving a problem you already have, and it should, ideally, be combined with methods that get you experience with the target customer (you might not really be 'typical'). But, it can get you empathy pretty quickly.

The key to this method is to do the thing the customer does and make it a part of your life. Become the customer for real. If you sell cars, buy a car. If your customer runs a small business, start a business. If your customer is a student, go to school.

Many companies encourage this behavior in their employees.

• Harley-Davidson employees almost all ride.
  
• Southwest executives fly coach (heck, everyone does!).
  
• TurboTax employees at Intuit do their taxes with TurboTax.

But... are you one of your customers? If not, is your understanding of their needs deep enough to really design solutions that delight them?

99 more methods to come...

101 Ways to get Deep Customer Empathy for Design Inspiration and Insights

Okay, so I'm not going to list all 101 right now. What I am going to do is start a series where I will be talking about these 101 ways. My goal is to write about at least 2 per week... but, before I start, I thought I'd lay some context:

Why do you need Deep Customer Empathy?

Have you ever bought a product, only to find that it wasn’t really what you thought you’d be getting, or that it did solve some of your problems in a way that didn’t work for you? Have you ever been disappointed at a present that someone got you that made it feel like they really didn’t understand you? Have you ever called a support line to get help and find yourself explaining your problem over and over before someone was able to solve it? If you’ve experienced any of these things, you’ve experienced what it is like to have someone lacking empathy for you and your perspective in the design of their offering.

Let’s turn that around.... have you ever bought a product, only to find that it went beyond your expectations in how well it solved your problems? Have you ever been delighted by a present that someone got you that you didn’t ask for, that made it feel like they understood you perfectly? Have you ever called a support line and had someone immediately understand and solve your problem? If so, you have experienced what it is like to have someone have empathy for you in the design of their offering.

Are you trying to create a product or service to solve problems for someone else? Would you like to have their experience align with the second paragraph? Then, you need to get deep empathy for your customer. You need to get to know them so well that you understand their needs better than they understand them themselves. The better you understand your customer, the more likely you are to find a way to delight them.

So, how do you get deep empathy for your customer?
To get empathy, you have to make a personal connection with them. You need to engage your internal emotional center, which is fed through specific stories and direct experiences. You aren’t going to deeply understand the customer’s perspective from a data point in a survey. Surveys, log-files, and call center analytics can engage your intellect and point you to problem areas, but they cannot help you get deep empathy. You need to be more intimate with your customers.

It is hard to understand your customer from your cube or office... Try to connect to where they are coming from.

The key to getting that recognition and understanding is to be able to relate to their world, their reality. To do that, you need to connect with where they are coming from: their environment, their expectations, their constraints. Unless you are solving for someone else who sits in a cube in a large corporation, you probably can’t fully recognize your customer’s perspective until you experience it for yourself first-hand.

The 101 methods fall into the following categories:

• Be the customer
• Have the customer teach you
• Watch the customer
• Talk with the customer
• Have the customer document it
• Talk with other, interested parties

The first method, falling into the category BE the customer was illustrated in my last blog posting. Find a problem that YOU personally have and solve that. That was how LL Bean got started... Leon Leonwood Bean was tired of having wet feet when hunting and fishing, so he invented a pair of waterproof boots. What problem do you have? (I'm sure you have at least one, we all do). What would it take for you to invent a solution?

100 more methods coming soon...