1. Learn empathy through personas.
I’ve come across a lot of engineers who just build stuff and expect people to “get it”. Thats fine if everyone were alike, but we’re individuals, who have different experiences, tastes, and ways of thinking and interacting. Think about the guy who just got laid off and now has to spend the next 2 hours researching health insurance, then fax in documents, make a few phone calls – be transferred multiple times – only to find out that he has to now wait two weeks for someone to “approve” of his medical records. What if he has a congenital disease and his prescription ran out the day he got laid off?
Yes, it’s an extreme case but stress does factor into the way humans interact with products and services, which is why its important to develop personas. A persona is an abstract representation of a set of behaviors. The persona’s name connotes her behavior e.g. “Jill” the receptionist at a yoga studio. Personas need to be developed for the primary group of individuals that will be using your product.
Immerse yourself in your user’s environment, and even better live a few days of their life. You will retain the emotional response you had giving you more intuition when designing a solution to their problems.
2. Kill a tree.
I love building stuff and I hate wasting time. Its important to build the right thing. So instead of diving into coding up a web app, I created rough drafts of my product purely on paper, and then spent a month doing usability testing with over a handful of users in stages. At each stage I would iterate on the feedback I received from my users. Paper prototyping is a powerful process. I was able to gauge how users felt about my product versus the competition, what was missing from it, and what could be done to improve the experience of interacting with it. I also learned what users thought the most critical features was, which is essential to developing a prototype.
3. Shut up and listen.
Listen to the problems of your users. All of them! An easy exercise to break the ice is to have a user walk you through their day, and have them highlight all their pain points. What was the latest catastrophe in their life? How did they solve it or try to solve it? From this you will learn how your users think, interact, and solve problems without you. This has to be an ongoing dialogue because your users’ needs will change and they will keep having different experiences, so keep the channel open. Expose problems over time, analyze them one at a time, and then create a bigger picture of their needs.
