So I just got back from 4 days in Las Vegas at Camp O. It was a life changing experience. I have spent the last 17 years of my life learning to be a consultant. My friend Daniel taught me that consulting is basically the diagram below 
and the process is something like this:
- Get you customers buy in to the hypothesis
- Develop a structured interview protocol
- Interview captive people who want to talk about their problems
- Synthesize that information into an abstract model using affinity grouping and other techinques
- Workshop your client until they agree on the model
- Deliver the insight to the client who says “wow we never looked at it this way”
This approach has stood me well in the last few years. When my new employer flew me out to Vegas to do their customer empathy exercise I assumed it would work just fine. Boy, was I wrong. One of the things I loved about the early days as the big S was the user experience research field. Ethnography, user interviews, hunt statements, the like. I had forgotten how different to consulting that was.
The customer empathy interviews are completely different to anything I could have conducted before. It is the diametric opposite of the consulting process. The intent is to get to know someone so you can answer questions about product, marketing, etc as if you were them. It is about getting in side their heads, their life, their reactions, and using that to inform you design and idea. it is about quotes, feelings, emotions, responses, drivers. It has blown me away. To quote from Difficult Conversations:
The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy…[which] involves a shift from observing how you seem on the outside, to imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside.
The customer empathy process is something like this:
- Try to work out where your demographic target hangs out
- Go to that location and befriend your target
- Explore your friendship/connection by asking about the why’s and responses to your questions
- Build a persona of who this person is … demographics, likes, dislikes, quotes, emotional stories and responses
- Use this to imagine how your target will interact with design and experience
The insights our team and others gained into our target customers, demographic and their focusing emotion (ours was anger) was incredible. I firmly believe that as interface development progresses from green screen to mouse-based to multi-touch gesture that we need to understand emotions in a much more significant way. Touch is a much more visceral sense as opposed to sight or sound (for me at least). To create useful interfaces that use touch, you must understand emotional response.
On another note, the process of working for 60 hours straight with only 3 hours of sleep created a team bond the likes of which I have never felt before. My team kicked arse and pushed outselves to levels we never knew we had. We lost, but we learned so much as we did it. Skip on Team Angry Money … and don’t forget “no pokey” …
Filed under: consulting, personal improvement
Most of what happens to you begins from one of two places: chance events or your own actions. Chance events you can do nothing about directly, but the way that you respond to those events likely determines much of their effect—at least on you. 
The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types. 
