Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

by Michele Hansen

The same person who makes leisurely pour-over on the weekend may choose pods during the week when they are pressed for time. Context, preferences, and constraints matter.

Valuable, usable, viable, and feasible

valuable for the customer, usable by the customer, viable for the company to support commercially, and feasible for the company to build.

Valuable: If the product isn’t something the customer needs, they won’t buy it. Usable: If the customer can’t figure out how to use it, they won’t use it (even if the value is there). Viable: If it doesn’t make money, the company will shut it down. Feasible: If it isn’t possible for the company to build, it will never get off the ground.

A customer can't possibly know

After you finish interviewing someone, you will always need to filter what people say through those lenses of viability and feasibility.

this evaluation happens after the interview. During the interview, you should imagine yourself as a sponge that is there to absorb whatever the person says.

Getting Started

This section is your guide to becoming a confident and capable interviewer: You—yes, you—can do this Learn how to interview: a step-by-step guide Practice interviewing—no customers required! Practice interview script

I recorded a sample interview as an episode of my podcast Software Social, and I encourage you to use it as a companion to this book. You will find a transcript of the interview in Part IX, Pulling It All Together: Sample Interview and Analysis and snippets of it throughout the book for illustration. You can find it here: deployempathy.com/sample-interview.

“it’s important to take a critical eye to make sure that you are using user research as an effective tool and not just using it as a way to say that you checked the box of user research… if you were going to make a decision regardless [of what users said], then you’re wasting their time.” And yours.

perhaps you often interrupt out of excitement and doubt whether you could suppress that instinct. Maybe you tend to get excited about what the other person is saying and want to jump in and relate your own experience or share your own ideas.

in a well-run interview, the interviewer only does ten percent of the talking.

rather than learning not to interrupt, you’ll need to give yourself permission to take up space and dig deeper.

You might find it easier to start with interactive interviews (such as testing a prototype or website) rather than digging into someone’s process and emotions.

When I’ve talked to people who identify as quiet who’ve read this book, it usually turns out that they’re already using a lot of the skills in this book without consciously realizing it. For example, following up doesn’t necessarily mean asking a question. It can also mean rephrasing what the person has said to elicit elaboration.

If someone is having a hard time, there is often an impulse to say something to the effect of “Things will get better!” or “At least [silver lining/worse thing didn’t happen],” which is well-intended yet unfortunately dismissive. An empathetic response would have been “It sounds like you’re having a hard time,” which makes the person feel heard.

Empathy is a learnable skill and you are doing the work to learn it by reading this book. The mere fact that you are currently reading a book about empathy shows that you care about other people.

I know this because I was told to read that book. I wrote this book from the perspective of someone who had to learn active listening the hard way. I had to learn how to submerge myself in what someone is saying. Not to interrupt. To leave pauses. To mirror. I’ve had to learn how to show empathy, to myself and others. To validate how someone else feels. To build rapport through listening. To let them find the answers, rather than sharing my own ideas. I tell you all of this to say: if I learned how to do this, anyone can. You can do this.

Learn how to interview: A Step-by-step guide

Step 1: Read the “How to Talk So People Will Talk” section.

You may find it helpful to apply the tactics to everyday conversations for practice. These tactics can be used with coworkers, people you mentor, friends, and family members.

You’ll know you learned something from that section if you find yourself noticing your own conversation tactics in everyday conversations.

Step 2: Do a practice interview.

Step 3: Analyze the practice interview for what you learned and how you conducted it.

Try to get a rough sense for the different functional/emotional/social factors that went into their decision,