Building Empathy

Peruse support tickets all night long. Don’t stay up watching crappy tv shows, investigate and dive deeeeep into Zendesk. Search for keywords relating to the problem you’re trying to solve.

Pick the brains of support, success and sales. Those guys have been retailers, they are the experts and they would love to help you out.

Don’t be afraid to ask silly questions. And if you still don’t understand, get them to run you through a real situation within the app.

Talk to customers. Set up formal interviews with a purpose. But don’t just focus on the customers that love us, talk to the ones that hate us too. Find out why the problem is even a problem. Dig deeper. Maybe even talk to people that aren’t our customers.

Measuring Success

Define Success early. How much more enjoyable is it when you know if you’re kicking ass, not just the company.

Use qualitative & quantitive data. Looking at big graphs and numbers is cool, but pick a few customers in that data to interview and validate your assumptions about their behavior.

Get creative. Sometimes success isn’t just about more revenue, it could be time saved doing a task… time is money.

Benchmark. Define success early and start tracking the right metrics as early as possible so that once your solution goes live you have something to compare.

Creating Solutions

Talk to customers. Get your thoughts in front of customers asap! Even while you’re in an interview, sketch and show.

Go with your gut. Sometimes you can’t always rationalise why something works but you know it could work. If you’re testing early and often it won’t be a waste of time.

Treat your prototypes like disposable meat. Throw it to the wolves. If the wolves don’t want to eat it, throw it away. Get your designs and sketches in front of people early and often.

Use conventions. Find out how other people are solving similar problems, use synthesis, get to a solution as quick as possible.

Kill trees. Print stuff out and chuck it on walls! Makes a great talking point for team standups, plus there’s 100% visibility for the team.

Design as a team. Figure out solutions with your whole team. But remember, it’s absolutely ok if they don’t want to be involved.

Use tools your comfortable with. If you love using Sketch, use sketch. If not, use something else.