Book Review: Deploy Empathy

How do you learn what people want? You interview them.

Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen is a practical guide to interviewing users. It covers all aspects of user interviews like preparation, recruitment, scripting, how to talk, and analysis.

I wanted to learn more about product development, and how to get better ideas based on real customer needs. I read The Mom Test last year and loved it; I wanted to learn more about interviewing users.

This is a summary of what I learned from Deploy Empathy.

First, how do you get people to talk to you?

To recruit people for interviews, you can tap into your pool of existing users and customers: the happy ones, the new ones, and the canceled ones. Hansen also explains how to recruit outside people from social media, forums, and email lists, and when it’s appropriate to offer compensation like gift cards and swag.

Ideally, you want to recruit enough people to do a set of five interviews per round. Five interviews is the sweet spot where anecdotes turn into actionable data.

Then we move on to interviewing users. The “how to talk so people will talk” section is packed with advice about how to conduct interviews to squeeze as much actionable information as possible out of the users.

The goal of user interviews is to learn what users think; it’s not to educate them and sell them something. We want to know what they work on and how they achieve it. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make immediate sense. We want to build trust with interviewees and give them space to express themselves. Ideally, they should do 90% of the talking.

To get users talking we have to gain their trust. Use a gentle tone of voice; speak to them like a respected grandparent.

Give them space to speak with long pauses, never interrupt them, let them drive the conversation.

Use simple wording and the interviewee’s own vocabulary; don’t use your own jargon. This makes them feel comfortable, builds trust, and opens them up.

When asking questions, ask about facts, not opinions.

Don’t ask “Would you use this feature?”—ask “How do you work? What’s your process?” Validate what they say, even if it’s wrong. Don’t correct them, we want to keep them talking, and learn about their world. Ask for clarifications when appropriate, repeat and rephrase what they say to ensure you get it and show you are listening.

Hansen also covers interview analysis and how to organize the collected information.

User interviews help identify pain points, which can then be plotted on what Hansen calls the pain/frequency matrix. Tasks are more or less frequent and more or less painful. “Pain” can be measured in time or money spent.

When developing products, focus on solving frequent and painful problems. If something is painful and frequent, making it faster, cheaper, or easier will be highly valuable. Something that takes an hour every day will almost certainly be valuable to work on. Something that takes an hour every month, or a minute every day, may be valuable, while something that takes a minute every month should be ignored: it’s not something worth focusing on.

This framework resonates with me because I have seen teams implement low-value features because they were “easy wins” or because “all the customers seem to want it.” These features almost always end up being a waste of time because they aren’t valuable. The pain/frequency matrix is a great way to address this kind of mindless product development.

I liked Deploy Empathy. I found it to be a good complement to The Mom Test. It is a practical book, with examples that help illustrate the concepts, and it covers the interview process from start to finish. I haven’t put it into practice yet, but I’ll make sure to re-read it once I interview folks for my next project.