Being Heard
Call us crazy but my wife and I have a camera in our apartment so that we can keep an eye on our dog (the love of our lives) while we’re away. He has a knack for making trouble and our furniture is often the victim of his troublemaking. Recently, I decided our old camera needed to be replaced. The old camera itself was slow, and low quality. The app to use it was buggy. When using the app, it would crash often, the microphone would screech in the most unpleasant way, and lastly our dog eventually found it and decided it was a toy. He proceeded to destroyed it.
After doing some research I found a camera that seemed too good to be true. It was significantly cheaper than any camera on the market, it was able to localize storage on an SD card in addition to saving important moments to the cloud, and the app is a pleasure to use. However, the new camera’s one pitfall is that I’m not able to access the footage from any place other than my phone. I reached out to the company’s customer support to ask if they had any plans to allow streaming from a web browser or desktop and I got an immediate response. The rep that responded, thanked me for my feedback, and let me know that he was about to go into a meeting with the rest of the development team and will bring this feedback up with them since they’re constantly trying to explore new ways customers are wanting to view the camera.
This answer was so simple, it did not make any promises, but it made me feel so good. I was trying to understand why I was so satisfied with what he had said to me. While reflecting, I thought of another piece of feedback that he could take into his meeting. Having this unique opportunity to be heard by this company in an immanent way I emailed the rep back and told him “in case you’re interested here is another piece of feedback for you about the app and one frustration I have”. The camera’s viewport in the app does not automatically adjust to the phones orientation as my last camera had. The rep got back to me right away mentioning he just logged my feedback and is taking it into his meeting as well.
This experience taught me that making someone feel listened to can be really simple to do and can make such a huge difference for someone’s experience. You don’t have to fix their problems or interject with some advice, but simply responding and making sure they know they were heard is all it takes.
As a UX designer we are exploring how to conduct successful interviews and it’s so much more than asking questions and recording answers. We are having real conversations with real people who may have very significant frustrations, it is not only our job to gather qualitative feedback but also to really listen in a way that makes interviewees feel heard. After all we may improve their experience simply by listening.
To end this story, that very same week I received an update for the camera app on my phone. To my delight, they had fixed the issue I had emailed about regarding the camera’s viewport not automatically adjusting to the phone’s orientation. They have secured a loyal customer for life.
