Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

by Michele Hansen

“The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand you agree with the other person’s ideas.”

It is similar to the concept of “beginner’s mindset”: suspending your own preconceived notions before entering a situation to uncover new information that you would not have come across had you kept only your own ideas in mind.

suspension of judgment is critical for finding problems that you may not have realized existed.

Payment processor Stripe is a notable example. According to Stripe product manager Theodora Chu, “at Stripe, the very first question you’ll get for any product proposal is, ‘Who are the users, and what do they care about?” Stripe not only integrates customer research into the core of their decision-making, they also encourage entire teams—developers included—to interview customers directly.

Over the thousands of interviews I’ve conducted, I’ve found that customers we interview tend to become our most vocal supporters.

Being listened to makes people feel happy, and the person talking associates those positive feelings with the person and concept they’re talking about. In the case of a customer interview, that means those happy feelings get transferred to you and in turn, your company.

The mere act of listening alone is powerful. I want you to remember that study when you find yourself wondering whether you’re asking the right questions, your interviews are long enough, or whether you’re analyzing them in the right way.

Just listening to customers alone has benefits for you and your company. Even if you do nothing with ...

This book is specifically intended to fill two gaps in the existing (and wonderful) body of work on customer research,

The first is specific words, phrases, and scripts to use when talking to customers,

The idea of this book is that, if you had to, you could read How to Talk So People Will Talk to get an idea for how to get people to open up, and then take one of the scripts into an interview with only minor adjustments. It is designed to be grab-and-go.

Second, with the exception of The User Experience Team of One, many of the books on user research are written with large, well-resourced teams in mind.

If you’re in a team setting, I suggest using this book in tandem with The Jobs to Be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach. Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users is excellent for those who have the res...

This book attempts to make customer research methods accessible to even the smallest of companies—including companies of one,

Paul Jarvis’ Company of One is one of the most influential books in the world of small software companies. Rob Walling’s Start Small, Stay Small and Arvid Kahl’s Zero to Sold are also part of that canon.

How this book is structured

Part II: Key Frameworks

Part III: Getting Started

Part IV: When Should You Do Interviews?

Part V: Recruiting Participants

Part VI: How to Talk So People Will Talk How to Talk So People Will Talk is the most important part of this book. Interviews are more like acting than a conversation, and this part will teach you specific tactics to use to help people open up and talk about relevant topics. If you are pressed for time, read this part and then skip to Appendix A to get power packs for specific situations.

Part VII: Interview Scripts This is the part you will probably reference the most in the future: the essentials of interviewing and the interview scripts. Here you’ll find nuts and bolts of interviews and interview scripts for specific scenarios

Do not start using the scripts before reading How to Talk So People Will Talk.

Part VIII: Analyzing Interviews

Part IX: Pulling It All Together: Sample Interview and Analysis This section shows you the interview tactics in action and walks

Part X: What Now?

Appendix A: Cheat Sheet Appendix A is your handy guide to skipping around this book. Trying to figure out what to build? Need to know why people cancel?

Appendix B: For Founders Appendix B is specifically for founders of small software companies. It includes discussion of common customer support situations, turning feature requests into research, the differences between support, sales, and research, and one way to use customer research as part of goal setting.

you can deploy empathy to uncover the process a customer is going through and in turn use that understanding to help you make business decisions.

three key frameworks

core questions to answer in an interview

three dimensions of a process: Functional, socia...

Valuable, usable, viable, a...

Sometimes people think they need to solve the entire process in order to create something others would buy. This is sometimes the case, but due to the complexity that goes into even “simple” tasks, making just one step easier, faster, or cheaper can make a huge difference for people.

Laundry detergent pods eliminate the relatively trivial step of measuring out laundry detergent. That trivial step is now a nine billion dollar annual global market.

People are more willing to pay to solve problems that are frequent, and people are more willing to pay to solve problems that are complex, time consuming, expensive to get wrong, or otherwise frustrating in some way.

Understanding the steps of a process and the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that lead someone to choose a particular route can uncover opportunities: for product creation, marketing, pricing, and more.

process-based understanding can enable you to see which steps are frequent and painful, which correl...

Starting to notice that many tasks are processes in your daily life will help you as you interview customers.

It will help you know when to dig deeper when someone says something that they regard as one task but is really a package of tasks, like “sending an invoice” or “scheduling a meeting.”2 Every task is a process. Every process is situational.

The core questions

The scripts build off a set of core questions: What are they trying to do overall? What are all of the steps in that process? Where are they now? Where does the problem you are solving fit in that process? Where in that process do they spend a lot of time or money? How often do they experience this problem? What have they already tried?

someone may grind coffee beans (task) to make themselves a cup of coffee (a collection of tasks, i.e., activity) to be able to focus on their work (goal).

larger goal is similar to what Kathy Sierra in Badass: Making Users Awesome calls the “Compelling Context.” It’s the big reason why someone does something in the first place.

If you are looking to do deeper reading, I would suggest reading Badass first then The Jobs to Be Done Playbook.

Functional, social, and emotional

A process—whether it’s buying a car, complying with regulators, or making coffee—has more than functional elements. There are social complexities (What other decision-makers are involved?) and emotional elements (How does completing the steps of the process make them feel?). There is an ecosystem of dimensions that work together to determine the kind of solution someone might consider.

Understanding these motivations and constraints are critical to understanding why someone might choose, continue using, or discontinue using a product:

A functional purpose An emotional dimension A social dimension

This even applies to luxury products. When someone buys a designer watch, they may tell themselves it’s because of the lifetime guarantee and craftsmanship (functional), yet they may also be looking to impress others (social) and feel like they deserve it given their hard work (emotional).