What are the most effective ways to understand user motivation and build empathy?

Conducting in-depth interviews, surveys, and observations are crucial to understanding the users' goals, pain points, and behaviors. It is important to ask open-ended questions to uncover their motivations and frustrations. Empathy and journey mapping are key pillars for understanding user motivation. These exercises allow the product manager to visualize the users' thoughts, feelings, and actions as well as recognize the user journeys. I host Weekly Design Thinking sessions in my team to go over user journeys and empathy mapping. These sessions allow out-of-the-box thinking, continuous innovation, and user-centric solutions.

User interviews are a goldmine for insights. Approach these conversations with an open mind and a curious attitude. Listen more than you speak, and encourage users to share their stories and experiences. This direct feedback is invaluable for understanding their motivations, challenges, and needs.

By conducting interviews you can garner a deep understanding about your end users thoughts, feelings, expectations, emotions and behaviours. Conducting interviews allows you to understand their motivations and adjusting your product based on these demands. You should prepare your interview questions with a clearly defined objective and take the time to connect with the interviewee.

User interviews is one of the strongest tools of a PM and can be used in many different scenarios. it is not a surprise that user interview can be effective to understand user motivation and build empathy, as you are talking directly to the user. As a PM, you have to make sure to tune the interview towards your goal, create a trust environment, listen to the user, acknowledge your understanding and their situation, if their stories align with things you have heard from others - let them know. try to understand their side, don't come with your agenda only.

I always look at interviews to find out why things fail, not why things work. As a Product Manager understanding the REAL problems your customers face should always be your north star. Good news? People love complaining about what hurts them in business and see you as an attentive listener and not a product pusher! Side Quest: The people who BUY from you are likely not the people who use it, ask a purchaser if you can spend 10 minutes with high touch SMEs and both your jobs will benefit.

Let’s not forget some more critical nuances regarding surveys and collecting quantitive data. - sample size justification - criteria for being included in the survey (even a portion of low sample quality may ruin the whole survey) - methods to validate data - sources and channels where the survey would be distributed. It should be planned very carefully and thoroughly - correlation doesn’t mean causation In many countries you need to get the user consent to even receive a message with invitation to the survey participation. These steps extend the survey timeline and decrease the conversion rate. It’s better to take into consideration when you discuss the estimated time of the results.

Surveys, much like Interviews allow you to garner a deep understanding about your end users thoughts, feelings, expectations, emotions and behaviours. Surveys are also a great way to gather blind feedback from a wider range of individuals as compared to interviews. Again, formulating your questions is key to this endeavour, ensuring that you are clear, concise and that the questions you ask are not leading or prone to bias.

Sometimes, what users say and what they do can differ. Observing users interacting with your product or a similar product in their natural environment can provide insights that interviews or surveys might miss. This method, known as ethnographic research, can uncover real, unarticulated needs.

Observing end users in their natural or personal environment can produce interesting findings about behaviours, patterns, needs, usage styles and motivations. Often times, simply doing interviews or surveys can be beneficial however actually seeing how people interact with your product can be drastically different than non-observable interactions.

When we were designing a new B2B digital product for the retail sector, we spent time observing people using similar products/apps in their everyday lives. We noticed things like where they got stuck or frustrated, which helped us figure out what needed to be improved. Plus, when we talked to users directly, we made sure to really listen to what they were saying – and what they weren't saying – to get a deeper understanding of what they needed. One person mentioned feeling overwhelmed by all the options, so we made sure to simplify things to make it easier for them. By combining watching and listening, we were able to make a product that really resonated with our users.

I’ve seen this as critically helpful. On a major project where I am the PM, I’ve been leading testing with the end users at a pilot site for several years, and during testing we have uncovered more improvements than any workshop or feedback session. One thing to keep in mind though is to get to a minimum viable product before bringing end users in. Otherwise you can easily build up negative feeling towards your product. M

Testing with end users can also be a beneficial mechanism to understand their behaviours, patterns, needs, usage styles and motivations. You are also able to better test any hypotheses, validate any assumptions that may have been made and potentially demonstrate prototypes or mockups for feedback.

Collaboration with end users can often be effective as users will feel more involved and motivated to generate ideas, explore opportunities and develop things that truly meet their needs. In order for this to be successful, you must have a clear understanding about your user segmentation, and have a clearly defined set of goals and objectives to facilitate productive co-creation initiatives.

One common mistake is narrowing the question to a specific problem and failing to see its overall importance compared to others. Funny enough, this approach exacerbates the "anchoring bias", giving the illusion that the problem may be bigger that in really is. An antidote used to prevent this effect is using open-ended questions (especially in the early stages of the discovery process), as preconized by Teresa Torres, and synthesizing the insights framing the issue under a common day's journey.

Understanding user motivation and building empathy are fundamental aspects of successful product development. Here are some effective ways to achieve this: Active User Research: * Conduct User Interviews: Talk directly to your users. Prepare open-ended questions to delve into their needs, challenges, goals, and frustrations. Actively listen and probe deeper to understand the "why" behind their responses. * Surveys and User Testing: Utilize surveys to gather broader user feedback and conduct usability testing to observe how users interact with your product or prototype. Analyze the data to identify user behavior patterns and pain points.

Be them. Becoming a user yourself is an unconventional, counter-intuitive way of trying to empathize with a user's needs. Here's what this entails: - Focus on the problems they solve. Shifting the focus from studying your competitor's features to using them for problem solving forces you to think like a user, unlocking new perspectives. - Be mindful of the product choices made. As PMs, we often tend to navigate through products quickly and miss the finer details. Slowing down and using a product more deliberately can offer new insights on some choices that shaped a product. - Examine the user journeys. Play out the critical paths and see what emotion the end-to-end experience evokes.

I would say that the only thing missing from this list is to get multiple sets of input on all of the above user data points. Try to bring multiple designers or product folks to these customer interactions and then socialize analysis among them after.