Wrapping up Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers - Part 4
This is the 4th and last post of my notes from the book "Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers" by Michele Hansen. You can also checkout the earlier notes here: part 1, part 2, part 3
This part is about analyzing the interviews and taking action by pulling together what you've learned.
Analyzing Interviews
You can use interviews to make decision about product (new features, what to build in the first place) and marketing.
For example, you can use pain and frequency matrix to identify desirable problems. You can use transcripts to create customer journey maps using both functional/social/emotional framework.
Don't make any major changes after one interview or even 5 interviews (typos and broken links are a fair game for fixing!)
Once you have done an interview and analyzed it, you have created a permanent resource for the company. Even if you don’t act on all of it now, you can reference it in years to come as new questions come up.
To get the most out of this section, listen to the sample interview and read the sample analysis which covers:
- What they are trying to do overall
- Their decision process for switching from one product to another
- The emotional, social, and intellectual components that influenced their decision making
Teams were more effective at pulling out user needs than individuals. However, don’t let that discourage you if you’re working alone. Pulling out 80 percent of the insights from an interview you’ve conducted and analyzed solo is better than zero percent from not doing the interview at all.
The sample interview analysis is very detailed and thorough. If you are a solo founder juggling many thing, there is an example of express version of the analysis.
Express Analysis
I really like this section. This is where we get to see a real practical example and real actions derived from an analyzing an actual customer conversation.
Example actions for the business directly from the customer:
- Action: Make CodePen demo code snippet and documentation more visible on the homepage. Derived from the customer saying this "I looked at the website and kind of skimmed the documentation and somehow came across a CodePen or some type of little code snippet that let me kind of test-drive it."
- Action: New headline/tagline "Up and running in 5 minutes. It really is as easy as it looks". Derived from this "And based on the documentation, I was like, if it’s really this easy, then I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it."
- Action: Ask the customer if they can use a quote directly from the interview transcipt as a Testimonial on the website. Based on this statement "I think I had working in five minutes...Oh man, I was elated. So I just kind of got my account set up, dropped in the React component, and there, it really just worked. It's up and working. And it's beautiful."
Example insights directly from what the customer said:
- Because competitors have convoluted pay-as-you-go pricing, "a clear pricing model will reduce potential customers' nervousness about using the product"
- The pain of switching combined with frequent need for the product is a very strong indicator for the long-term viability of this business
What Now?
I hope you remember that this book is here to act as a springboard and is your toolbox for getting useful information from customers and potential customers.
I hope you carry through the empathy you’ve deployed in your interviews to your business decisions and interactions with others.
I hope it helps you consider how and what you would want to happen if you were the customer yourself.
The last lines of this book reminds me of the last lines from Shawshank (wonder if intentional, probably not. Either way I love it.)
"[Andy] Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies... [Red] I hope the pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope."
(That might not be 100% accurate, quoting from memory)
And with that we leave behind this book. I hope you've enjoyed this presentation of Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen.
I'm inspired to schedule some mock interviews with friends and real interviews with customers. I'll share my findings on this list at some point.
In the meantime, will be starting another book next week (tent topic = copywriting)! If you want to follow along and get notes straight to your inbox, drop your email below.
