Intelligence vs Understanding

Written byIndi Young. 4 comments

Indi Young

A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, Indi has worked with an impressive collection of clients, including Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. Now working as an independent consultant, she is the author of a recent Rosenfeld Media book “Mental Models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior”.

Solving problems requires more than brainpower and a design fix. We need to feel our customer’s pain to fully understand what they need. So throw off your thongs and get ready to walk a mile in your client’s shoes.

A hum­ming­bird lands on the ground out­side your win­dow and sits there, still.

Then she flops over, strug­gles and sits upright again. This is so unlike hum­ming­birds that you react: what’s wrong? Are you okay? Can I help you?

You can feel your reac­tion: your heart might beat a lit­tle faster and your eyes might get a bit misty. You think about the things a hum­ming­bird might need to stay healthy: nec­tar, water, warmth … what else? Since you’re at your com­puter, you do a quick Google search to see if you can learn a bit more about help­ing this tiny bird out­side your win­dow. Then there’s a move­ment at the cor­ner of your eye and you look over just in time to see the hum­ming­bird fly off. Again, a pal­pa­ble feel­ing engulfs your body: relief, relax­ing of mus­cles. You turn back to your com­puter able to focus on work again.

There’s a new mes­sage in your inbox. It’s your boss send­ing you the require­ments doc­u­ment for the new prod­uct. Next Mon­day is the start of the project. You open the doc­u­ment and flip through it, try­ing to get a sense of the struc­ture of the infor­ma­tion, see­ing how every­thing is organ­ised. There’s a chap­ter that catches your eye about the end cus­tomer. You read the first para­graph, curi­ous about the gen­eral nature of the prob­lem. The cus­tomer is some­one con­tribut­ing to a super­an­nu­a­tion fund to save for their retire­ment. They need to know rate of finan­cial gain over the years to cal­cu­late how much they will end up with by age 65. The cus­tomer needs to be able to choose dif­fer­ent funds that have dif­fer­ent rates of return and also be able to move their money from fund to fund as rates of return change. You move on to another sec­tion of the doc­u­ment, then look up from your com­puter and think about get­ting a cup of tea.

Where’s the Empathy?

These two events, the hum­ming­bird and the require­ments doc­u­ment, couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent. And yet, they should be the same. I believe that you can­not develop a good solu­tion for some­one with­out empathis­ing with that per­son, with­out feel­ing some­thing about their sit­u­a­tion. Sure, you know that the cus­tomer needs to be able to switch their money from fund to fund, so you could cre­ate an appli­ca­tion that has three fields to spec­ify the fund to trans­fer from, the fund to trans­fer to and the amount. But why are they trans­fer­ring those funds? What vari­ables gov­ern their deci­sion to trans­fer funds? What’s going on in their life? If you knew the customer’s brother just told them to get out of the high-​​risk fund, could you sup­port them bet­ter than just those three fields? Is there a cal­cu­la­tion to help them decide how much of their funds to trans­fer out, and how much to leave, based on fees they might incur and losses they might take if they stay in the one fund? Is there his­toric data you could show them that might give them con­fi­dence that a down­turn is always fol­lowed by an upturn in the mar­ket? What else do they need to know? How can you help them?

There is a dif­fer­ence between read­ing the intel­li­gence about what a cus­tomer needs and under­stand­ing what is dri­ving them. Rather than the basic needs, dis­tilled down to hol­low neces­si­ties through the process of writ­ing the require­ments doc­u­ment, you need to under­stand the richer set of ingre­di­ents that go into mak­ing a cus­tomer need to trans­fer funds. With this under­stand­ing, this empa­thy, you can design a richer set of tools that sup­port the cus­tomer bet­ter than just three fields to trans­fer funds.

How do you find out what goes on inside a customer’s mind if all you get is a require­ments doc­u­ment? Easy: ask the cus­tomers to tell you.

Make a Connection

What I mean by ask­ing cus­tomers is not the same as what organ­i­sa­tions have done for the past decades. Do not ask them what they want. Ask them what they are try­ing to get done and why. Con­nect with them. Try on their life for a bit; walk in their shoes for a mile. For­get for a minute that you are a designer and that you have this mech­a­nism inside you that insists on find­ing a fix for a prob­lem. Turn off that mech­a­nism if you can, let go of your prod­uct and what you were hired to do and just empathise. After you have a deep under­stand­ing of the customer’s world, then you can fire up your brain and solve prob­lems, but not until you have walked in their world and devel­oped an under­stand­ing of it.

Inter­view­ing is the best process for this. Obser­va­tion is also help­ful and always wel­come if there is time and resources. How­ever, to get to the rea­sons behind someone’s actions, you will need to ask them about it. You need to inter­act with a cus­tomer to dis­cover this. Fol­low the time-​​honoured tech­nique called non-​​directed inter­view­ing. Let the cus­tomer dic­tate the top­ics, the vocab­u­lary and the direc­tion in which the con­ver­sa­tion meanders.

Avoid writ­ing any of your ques­tions down in advance since that usu­ally leads to recita­tion and a hack­neyed inter­view tech­nique. If you must make a list of top­ics to remem­ber, write them as one– or two-​​noun prompts to remind you, in no par­tic­u­lar order. Non-​​directed inter­views are not easy to con­duct. You’ll need some prac­tice and a few guidelines.

Lis­ten Well

Last year I was sit­ting in a ses­sion about sto­ry­telling by Kevin Brooks and he said some­thing that caused a cas­cade in my head. He said, “Most peo­ple don’t lis­ten to what some­one is say­ing in a con­ver­sa­tion because they’re too busy look­ing for a place to inter­ject what they want to say about the topic.” A mor­ti­fied smile crept across my face. From that day for­ward, I have con­sciously focused on what my friends are say­ing, putting my own respond­ing sto­ries on hold, or never even telling them. Instead I fol­low the folds and courses of my friends’ sto­ries. I try to see things from their eyes and ask ques­tions to extract a richer understanding.

Part of my pro­fes­sional life involves doing this; I don’t know why I wasn’t apply­ing it to my every­day life. At work, I lis­ten to peo­ple describe what they are doing then coax out an expla­na­tion of under­ly­ing moti­va­tions. The most reward­ing con­ver­sa­tions stray into new ter­ri­tory and my par­tic­i­pant gets to think some­thing through in real-​​time and explain it to me. It’s very sat­is­fy­ing for both of us, because new under­stand­ing blooms and we get a lit­tle buzz from dis­cov­er­ing it. For exam­ple, dur­ing an inter­view in Mel­bourne, a woman kept telling us that she wanted to ensure she wouldn’t have to worry about how she was spend­ing money while in retire­ment. I asked her why sev­eral times and at the end she said, “You know, I think I feel this way because I watched my par­ents worry and make sac­ri­fices all the time. I don’t want to be in that posi­tion.” It was some­thing she hadn’t enun­ci­ated before, even to her­self. After say­ing it, she laughed and told us how that made so much sense to her now.

Look for Emo­tional Markers

In Paul Ekman’s book Emo­tions Revealed, he explains that anger is the response to inter­fer­ence. In a busi­ness set­ting, anger shows up as a sim­mer­ing feel­ing of upset, and from there, often, to the sow­ing of dis­grun­tled com­plaints in sym­pa­thetic ears. This kind of stuff shows up in the mod­els I draw all the time and it is important.

While in con­ver­sa­tion with a cus­tomer, prick your ears up if you sense frus­tra­tion. This is a marker that some­thing is inter­fer­ing with the cus­tomer, keep­ing them from achiev­ing what they want to get done. Dig in here; explore what is caus­ing this and, more impor­tantly, explore their reac­tion, why it goes against their habits or beliefs and all the things they do to work around it.

Cap­ture the upset feel­ings and the extra steps in a men­tal model. When you are review­ing the model for areas to work on, these areas of emo­tion will be rich veins to mine. For exam­ple, sev­eral times “dis­trust sales­per­son” has appeared in mod­els about the cus­tomers of an organ­i­sa­tion. The cus­tomers went to great lengths to con­tact a tech­ni­cal rep whom they trusted to tell them the hon­est truth about how well a prod­uct might work in their unique set of con­straints. The cus­tomers also sought out other peo­ple who had pur­chased the prod­uct to ask them what prob­lems they ran into, or if the prod­uct was a poor fit in any way. What I sug­gested in these sit­u­a­tions was that the organ­i­sa­tion change the way it sold prod­ucts. I made the appalling rec­om­men­da­tion that they get rid of sales­peo­ple and hire more tech­ni­cal reps instead, as well as spon­sor user groups and adver­tise their pres­ence to poten­tial cus­tomers as a source of peo­ple to con­tact about the prod­uct. As you might guess, these sug­ges­tions got nowhere. But given the right tim­ing and the right set of peo­ple who are will­ing to see the oppor­tu­nity for what it is, I pre­dict this sug­ges­tion will increase sales by a respectable amount.

Under­stand­ing Can Guide Strate­gic Decisions

A deep under­stand­ing of a customer’s world gives you a wealth of pos­si­bil­i­ties, an amaz­ing breadth of ideas to sup­port them. The more you can think and feel like a cus­tomer, the bet­ter you can imag­ine what ser­vices to offer them. Replace the chap­ter about cus­tomers in the require­ments doc­u­ment with a rich model of their world and your organ­i­sa­tion will be on a new path to success.

Further Reading

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Comments on this article

  1. Written byPedro Mendes on the 29th of October

    I mostly agree with Indi’s arti­cle. The prob­lem may be when between the design­ers and the cos­tumer comes a mid­dle layer of man­agers who think they know what the end user wants. It is a strug­gle, believe me! :-)

  2. Written byDaniel Reeders on the 31st of October

    I’m read­ing Indi’s arti­cle in a rather dif­fer­ent con­text, work­ing in gay men’s health pro­mo­tion, and it’s all highly applic­a­ble to the key chal­lenges in my work. There’s a pow­er­ful expec­ta­tion that we’ll all use pub­lished research in pub­lic health and the clin­i­cal sci­ences to pro­duce “evidence-​​based inter­ven­tions”, yet it’s tak­ing the time for mak­ing human con­nec­tion and empa­thy that pro­duces really good cam­paigns and resources. I guess my ques­tion then is: how do we legit­imise empa­thy as a source of data and the basis of busi­ness or pub­lic health decision-​​making?

  3. Written byIndi Young on the 4th of November

    Indi Young

    The best way to legit­imize empa­thy as a research source is to prac­tice it “under the radar,” if you can’t get per­mis­sion, and then point to the good results that come from it and open people’s eyes. I have had to do the same thing for the past decade, plus I can be very per­sua­sive. (I have to admit that my clients self-​​select these days, so I haven’t had to fight quite as much for it recently.)

    The more of us that talk about it and pub­lish about it, the more you can point your naysayers/​doubters to the col­lected experiences.

  4. Written byFarrhad A on Twitter! on the 29th of January

    Came here from the Kiss­Met­rics tweet. A very intel­li­gent and well writ­ten post. Enjoyed read­ing :)
    *And I love your design*

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