Customer Interviews & Mental Modeling
The more I spoke to customers, the more I could speak their language and understand how they think and what might be holding them back. Here’s an example something I learned from a customer interview, when I realized that what we were calling “indications” (rough insurance quotes) wasn’t the same as what they understood as “indications”. There was apparent alignment, because they and we meant “rough quotes”, but turned out we used the concept differently. As a result, customers were approaching what we were offering with the wrong preconceptions:
| Mental Concept of “Indications” | Customer’s Mental Model | ≠ | How It Worked In Our Product |
| Effort | Takes some effort – broker attempts to tailor assumptions or get preliminary info from client | ≠ | Focus on high-volume, low-margins means initially putting in minimal effort |
| Pricing | Fairly close to final quote; client can use it to weed out some options | ≠ | Ballpark to start conversation; no point comparing options yet |
| Application Requirements | Enter as much as you know | ≠ | AI-driven or generic assumptions for faster response |
| Time Frame | Usually 14-30 days out from when you need final pricing | ≠ | Allow to start conversation much earlier, 60+ days out |
Conflicting Mental Models: Learning how brokers think and make trade-offs a key part of my job. For example, brokers traditionally want to send insurance providers strong deals to gain preferential treatment in the future. If they send weak deals, it might damage their reputation. With APIs, they didn’t need to worry about this, because no humans are involved on the receiving end. But old habits may have caused people to avoiding sending greater volumes through the email bot. Empathy means going beneath the surface to understand the oft unspoken principles and values guiding people’s work.
Push/Pull or Forces Analysis
This is a great framework from the Jobs to Be Done field, which I use often to convey the motivations and obstacles of a decision gathered from interviews. It’s a type of mental modeling. I can’t share a real example, but here’s a great illustration (Source):
Customer Profile
I ran a workshop with Sales and CX to understand how we can share and divide the responsibilities for customer discovery among the team. We came to better understand what CX requires from Sales and what Sales is able to get from customers they speak to. I developed a framework for a “Customer Profile” with itemized criteria rated by importance and who is responsible. This eventually became a Google Doc form, and then later was merged into our CRM system. This profile goes beyond being a research technique. It determines how the company triages prospects, where we invest our efforts, and how we close gaps in understanding that impact everyone, from sales to product. Here’s a key gap that was identified: when brokers do not have enough experience with cyber, they are less ideal customers for us – this framework I helped craft reminds the team what to ask them, what to train them on, and whether they are a good fit in the first place:
Shipping To Learn / MVP
One needs to get the smallest viable solution into the hands of customers. Feedback based on real-world usage of a basic solution or a prototype provides more clarity than rigorous user testing of a complex solution in hypothetical situations. Shipping to learn helps tame the complexity that often bogs down teams trying to find their product-market fit. This involved breaking features down to understand what is absolutely essential:
Wizard of Oz & Other Lean Prototyping
“The Wizard of Oz test essentially tries to fool potential customers into believing they are using a finished, automated offering, while it is still being run manually. ” – BMI Lab
I used this technique successfully to test a Gen AI solution. This had several advantages:
- AI was rapidly changing but not yet ready; this technique allowed us to get ahead of the technology limitations and envision the future
- We could collect more real-world data from customers (who submitted real documents, made real queries), which we could then use to evaluate the AI internally, safely
- Building AI tools was a new skill for the team; this technique kept us from pulling development resources off other critical projects
- Customer actually benefited from the test – when we ended the experiment after 2 weeks, they were eager to get it back. This was great validation for us.
Remote Testing: Clickable Prototypes, A/B comparisons, and 5-Second Tests (via Maze)
There are great tools now that combine sharable prototypes with slides and surveys. This is especially useful for hallway testing remotely. I set up an experiment, present the context for the user, and then have them perform a set of tasks and answer some questions. The advantage of this over moderated testing is they can do it on their own schedule. I would typically follow up with questions over email. The biggest things I learned about running this kind of test is to test the test – roll out v1 to one or two people to catch any issues. You often need to add clarification, reword or reorder steps before it’s ready to scale. This was particularly useful for quick Hallway Tests with SMEs.
Job Mapping Based on Strategyn’s “Outcome-Driven Innovation”
ODI breaks all processes down into basic phases, whether it’s surgery or selling a home. The activity’s outcome is defined in a standardized way like: “Minimize the time it takes to assemble a proposal to the insured”. This leads to a deep understanding of how the user completes their task. Customers can then be surveyed about their success with very well defined tasks, which leads to a quantified understanding of wider market needs. Here’s a sample activity:
Situational Personas
I introduced the personas concept to a Fintech client to help them shift away from a focus on features and technical capabilities. I started by asking the client to itemize their audiences in a spreadsheet. Then we identified some “top needs”, based on their calls with customer and industry subject matter experts. Later, on another project, I asked them to write first-person user stories.
Over time, the requirements started include more emotional and situational context. At that point, I started to distill insights into personas that focus on the user’s situation:
Context builds actionable empathy and elicits tons of new product ideas and marketing strategies. What seemed like one type of user falls apart into 3 different types of users with distinct, nuanced needs.
Voice of The Customer
This is a type of research that focuses on capturing and sharing words that customers say. On a more recent project, I defined target audiences through story telling rather than demographics e.g., a team large enough where poor intake clarity starts to cause task assignment confusion. I base the quotes on real interviews, so it resonates in our marketing. I create a specific contrast between before and after, so it’s clear what our product solves (a UI pattern that performed well in A/B tests in the past). The goal is to write copy that resonates with customers, because it’s what they themselves would say.
This perspective can be applied to other content, like this feature matrix:
Pre-2019 examples:
Mining Customer Reviews
For one client, I distilled dozens of pages of user reviews into a concise report with 18 themes (Affinity Mapping). The themes described in Pain English what customers thought, supported by 200+ actual quotes of customers. Here are some themes for their Error Tracking software:
Mapping User Flow / User Journey
I have experience mapping complex processes. In this example, I facilitated a session with SMEs to understand the key steps of a health care process, including role of existing IT system (SMEs are usually senior/former users or people intimately acquainted with the process). I broke the process down into higher level phases:
Next step would be to label this process with assumptions, problems, and opportunities (not shown).
Contextual Inquiry / Job Shadowing
I shadowed a health inspector and documented their process as multi-participant user flows:
I then analyzed these flows to figure out how the process could be improved through efficiencies and use of technology like tablets.
Here’s me touring a coal mine client to gain a deeper appreciation for the business and user context:
Funnel Analysis
For an online experience, I often started with a rough funnel, showing the customer’s journey backed up with visit & conversion metrics. I could identify points in the process where users give up or digress from the path to their goal.
Why isn’t this chart prettier? Because it not going into a magazine. It gets the job done, and then it’s not needed anymore.
This chart hinted at steps where the problem manifests. Similar to a sitemap, this could also help identify problems with the overall IA of a site (e.g., if there are lots of loop-backs or some pages aren’t being visited). Here, for example, I noticed that 50%+ of people drop off at the Tour, which suggested removing or improving the Tour. I also see there are many steps before actual enrollment. Some of my A/B tests tried different ways to move the Enrollment call-to-action higher in the process.
Listening In On Calls & Reading Emails / Chat Logs
There’s nothing like getting the user’s actual words, hearing the tone in their voice, reading between the lines. I’ve listened in on call center conversations to identify common customer questions and persuasive techniques used by CSRs. I’ve also read chat logs and emails to better understand what customers care about.
Remote Monitoring
I’ve used a number of screen replay tools to observe users and identify potential usability issues. To help sort out useful videos with this technique, I tagged various user events using URLs and custom JavaScript. That way I could find and observe problems like, say, only videos of users that completed a form but didn’t click submit:
Linking screen replays and analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) is a useful and cheap way to do usability testing, because you can define a behavior KPI and then filter videos showing that behavior e.g., someone going back and forth between screens or hesitating to click something.
Heatmaps, Clicks, Attention Tracking
In one test, I used the heat map to corroborate our statistically strong finding. I tested a new home page with a simple gradual engagement element: a clear question with several buttons to choose from:
Our hypothesis was that gradual engagement would guide visitors better toward signing up. The heatmaps for the other variations showed clicks on top menu links and all over the page. In contrast, our winner showed clicks on just the buttons I added. There was virtually no distracted clicking elsewhere. This was reassuring. I also saw a pattern in the choices visitors were clicking.
Sometimes I wanted to test if visitors were paying attention to non-clickable content, like sales copy. One of the tools I’ve used was a script I created to track scroll position. By making some assumptions, I could infer how much time users spent looking at specific content of the site. You can see a demo here
Self-Identification
Sometimes designs offer an opportunity to both test a hypothesis and collect data. For one project, I decided that, instead of emphasizing lowest prices (as the norm in that saturated market), I would emphasize our client’s experience dealing with specific real life scenarios (Authority principle). So I interviewed the client further to understand specific scenarios their customers might be facing (based on their own customer conversations and industry knowledge). Then I wrote copy to address customers in each situation:
Now, by giving clickable options, I could track which options users are clicking. Over time, I could learn which scenarios are most common and then tailor the site more to those users.
Use Cases
I interviewed subject matter experts to better understand the end users’ requirements. I summarized the interests of each user segment using some a User-Goal Matrix, such as:
Here’s another example:
User Narratives & Storyboards
The key here is again to build empathy. “Need to do X” may be a requirement, but do X where, why?
Thinking through the plot of a user story helped put me in the shoes of a user and imagine potential requirements to propose to the client (like using Street View, above, or automatically finding similar restaurants nearby). You think “If that actually were me, I’d want to…”
On another project, I documented the user story as a comic book with 2 personas. Here a nurse visits an at-risk new mom and searches for clues she may be depressed and a danger to herself or her child:
Instead of a table of things to look for, the comic shows clues in context (curtains drawn, signs of crying, etc). This kind of deliverable is a good way to build empathy for the project’s users (nurses finding themselves in these situations) and the end recipients of the service (their at-risk clients).
Customer Interviews & Jobs Theory
I’ve interviewed software users and SMEs. I’m also familiar with consumer interview techniques, including Jobs To Be Done.
I use JTBD insights to shape how I define requirements with clients. JTBD theory argues that the user’s situation is a better predictor of behavior than demographic details. Its emphasis is on capturing the customer’s thinking in that precise moment when they decide to buy a product, especially when they switch products.
See my article 15 Jobs-To-Be-Done Interview Techniques
A/B Testing
I’ve run A/B tests to compare large redesigns as well as smaller changes. Large redesigns only tell us which version is better, while smaller changes help pinpoint the specific cause (which tells us more about users):
As part of A/B testing, I tracked multiple metrics. That way I could say, for example, “the new page increased engagement but didn’t lead to more sales” or “we didn’t increase the volume of sales but order value went up”.
User Analytics & Segmentation
I used Google Analytics and A/B testing tools to segmented visitor data. A classic case is Mobile vs. Desktop segments:
Another useful segmentation is New Visitors vs. Existing Customers, which I tracked by setting/reading cookies. I also segmented users by behavior e.g., Users Who Clicked a webpage element or hit a page.
I’ve done statistical and qualitative analysis of the data collected, teasing out relationships between various user behaviors:
User Testing
I’ve created test cases for moderated testing workshops. One type of user test provided detailed instructions for a user to follow.
“Log into the case dashboard. Find out if there are any cases that need to be escalated asap and flag them for the supervisor.”
Another type of test case posed open-ended goals to see if the user could figure out how to do it.
“You’re a data-entry clerk. You’ve just received a report from John in damage claims. What would you do next? Let the moderator know if you encounter problems or have questions.”
Or
“A cargo ship arrived into the East Port carrying 100 tons of fuel. When is the next train arriving and does it have enough capacity to transport this fuel to the Main Hub?”
I’ve observed users going about their task. The acceptance criteria included usability (is the user struggling to perform the task) and completion (is the user able to complete their job task). Users provided feedback verbally and using a template like this:
I’ve also created detailed training/test scenarios that closely mimicked real job conditions. Users had to successfully complete the tasks and confirm they matched reality.
Hands-On Hardware Research
On one project, I had to understand how to deploy touch-screens and new software across dental offices. I tested the touch-screens on site and interfaced them with the digital X-Ray equipment. I’ve also used:
- dive computers
- VR headsets
- synthesizers