User Needs Support, User Needs Empathy, I Need Coffee
Really being able to understand users’ needs is critical to product design and development. This blog looks at how empathy is key.
“Hello, you’re through to N-central tech support; my name is Jon, can I start by taking your name please?…”
If you’re an N-able N-central user over the past five years, then there’s every chance you heard these words uttered through my gritted teeth at one point or another. Don’t get me wrong, you being on the other end of the line wasn’t the reason for my anxiety — it was the fact you had to call!
I am acutely aware our users are well versed in the technological goings on within their own infrastructure. In fact, most of them eclipse my own experience with the product. So, when they’re forced to call, it’s a safe bet that they’ve exhausted all the obvious troubleshooting steps. All this to say; whenever I heard that overly jolly, somewhat triggering Cisco ringtone, I knew I probably had the pleasure of deep diving into a sea of complex software jargon, iterating and reiterating PSQL queries in the hopes to find a particular data entry, or scouring through billions of lines of error logs coming my way.
Solving problems not just fixing them
Being in tech support has showed me that solving a problem and fixing a problem are two very different things.
Solving a problem is great in the short term. You can create workarounds or tweak an info file here and there and the thing will work. As you can imagine, this is not so ideal when you have thousands of endpoints to apply these workarounds to. It often left me wondering “when are we going to fix this nonsense?”… So, I decided to shift my career back into design.
“Back?”, I hear you ask. I had a background in product design before joining the company as a tech support agent. I had just finished my degree in it. It may seem odd to have done a design degree and jump into software like that, but I can assure you it was the typical, “I can’t keep serving chicken part-time and expect to cover the bills” story. Fortunately, there are a lot of cross-over skills required in design and in support. Communication, problem solving and, arguably the most important of the lot, empathy.
If you’re familiar with design lingo, you’ll likely have heard someone mention “user needs”. It’s a phrase which is often misused by people who are trying to push whatever shiny new feature they think will be their ‘game-changer’. To them, it’s a checkbox exercise that hopes to make the shiny new feature easy to use and “aesthetically pleasing”. (Coincidentally, “aesthetically pleasing” is another one of those phrases that is often misused. If it’s ‘aesthetic’ it’s already ‘pleasing’. Let’s all just take a moment to forget that phrase forever.)
Understanding user needs is far more than workflows and buttons. In fact, it goes even further than assuming you know what the user would intend to do and how they’d do it. To truly understand the user’s needs, you need to be able to empathize with them.
Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but they are profoundly different. Both words reflect how we resonate our understanding of emotion with another person. Have you ever come within an inch of throwing your keyboard through your monitor in response to another error message or failed deployment? Sympathy would respond with “Oh, I’m sorry you feel that way, I hope it gets better”. Whereas with empathy, I’m right there with you, probably browsing Amazon to see if we can afford to replace our keyboards and monitors. Both will recognize the situation isn’t great, but empathy is able to feel similar struggles because of having relatable experiences.
The route to understanding users’ needs
For us to truly understand a user’s needs. We need to be able to empathize. And for that, we need to build an internal repertoire of experiences that are relatable to the user in question. There are several tools we can use to build this bank of experience. For example, “Show me sessions” will allow us to observe how a user does a particular task. Here we don’t just see how they get from A to B; we observe the reactions they have to particular events. We essentially live vicariously through our users to understand their pain points and little wins.
As you can imagine, it takes a lot of time, effort and exposure for designers and researchers to truly be able to empathize with the user. Their dedication to understanding the highs and lows of using a product makes them great at what they do. However, this is where I feel uniquely placed and incredibly fortunate. My time in support quite literally entrenched me in the world of what our users do. I had two years of non-stop ‘show me sessions’. I just didn’t recognize it at the time.
Regardless of the complexity, every call I took provided me with a new feedback loop of issues our users faced. The conversations I had brought to life the significance of how each step influenced the broader picture that each user was working through. To top it off, I clocked up thousands of hours as a user of some of our products, all with a distinct focus on resolving issues with the product itself.
So, at this point in my caffeine fueled rant, you might be wondering, how does an empathetic understanding of the user actually help the user? It’s a fair question!
When I said earlier that “user needs” is a phrase people misuse. It’s because when we are all sat around the discussion table, what users need is often said through the lens of “they need THIS,” where “this” is driven by what the organization wants. As designers and researchers, our understanding of user needs helps us direct the conversations to bring actual value to our users. In essence, we are the voice of our users at the table where decisions are made. And that voice has a lot more conviction when we feel the same pain points our users do.
“So, thank you for taking the time to call N-central tech support today. As I mentioned earlier, my name is Jon, and if you’d spare a moment to leave some feedback, I’d very much appreciate it.”
Jonathan MacLean
User Experience Designer
