Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

You want to pay particular attention to: What kind of tool they're using for something (Note: I'm using “tool” in an anthropological sense here; a manual process or way of thinking or approaching something can be a tool as much as hammer or a piece of software is) What problem the tool solves for them, and which related problems they have that it d

Step 6: Make interviewing a regular part of your process.

As defined by design strategist Indi Young in Practical Empathy, empathy is “about understanding how another person thinks, and acknowledging [their] reasoning and emotions as valid, even if they differ from your own understanding.”

It is worth taking a moment to differentiate between empathy, sympathy, and solution-based responses. For example, if someone says, “My boss yelled at me today!” a sympathetic response would be “I’m sorry that happened to you” (which creates distance between the original speaker and the person replying), and a solution response would be “You should

You will likely encounter other situations where you want to interview people. To that end, remember the overall framework for interviews: What they’re trying to do overall The steps they take to do that What they’ve already tried Where they spend time and money throughout the entire process How often they experience the problem How long it takes t

Step 5: Sort through applicants.

But they eventually learned a trick. Whenever someone said what they did, they replied with “That sounds challenging,” even if the person’s job sounded easy or boring. People would open up, because it felt like a compliment, and it would lead to an interesting conversation about the things that person did at work.

Never Split the Difference When I was in business school, I took a course on negotiations. The skills I learned in that one semester alone more than paid for the entire cost of the degree within a year of me taking that class. But not everyone can attend an in-person negotiations class for three months. This book is the next best thing.

When using validating phrases, I encourage you to use the word “think” instead of “feel.” Some people, I’ve noticed, will find it insulting to say that they feel a certain way, but think is interpreted as more neutral and factual. For example: You feel the process is complicated. versus You think the process is complicated. Or, better: The process