Q&A With Amy Lobé

Amy Lobé at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://youtu.be/CD2trPUMVsM

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Sourcing clients and end users for customer deep dives

[00:00:00] Host: Now we're going to jump over to talk to Amy, who gave a talk about getting to know you: how customer deep dives work at Seccl. Hello, Amy.

[00:00:11] Amy: Hi.

[00:00:12] Host: Nice to meet you properly.

[00:00:14] Amy: Nice to meet you.

[00:00:14] Host: And we have a cat as well.

[00:00:17] Amy: Yes, one of my cats has joined me. Hopefully the other one will stay in bed asleep, but you never know. Apologies if they interrupt.

[00:00:25] Host: No worries, always good to see that. What I loved about your talk was getting everybody involved. I think Pavitra [?] touched on it earlier: get the developers in early. I've seen so many places where it's the opposite; it's just developers at the end. So I really liked how you talked about how you structure and do that. One of the things I'm going to ask is probably more on the operational side. If somebody was to take this on, how do you source and get the clients and people to talk to? Because that's a big, scary overhead, and it'll often just get pushed to the side.

[00:01:11] Amy: I think at Seccl we're very lucky that we are business to business, so the people we're talking to are actually our clients, and they have a vested interest in giving us as much feedback as possible, because it makes us aware of their problems and helps us prioritize their problems. We also have a bank of people who are end users. Obviously we provide our products to our clients, and they use part of it, but then there's another set of users who use our clients' products, and they think, because we're in stealth mode, that it's them, not us [?]. We have gathered those people via social media.

[00:01:57] What we do each time: our clients obviously give us their time as part of our working relationship, and that is fantastic. For the people we have sourced via social media, you would normally be paying incentives for them, but we tend to use charitable incentives instead. It just fits with our ethos a little bit more: give us some of your time and we'll make a significant donation to a charity on your behalf.

[00:02:32] Host: That's great. Is there much overhead for you in doing that, or is that something you've largely automated in the background?

[00:02:41] Amy: I think it's just a case of getting people in the right place at the right time, which is fairly easy. We have regular meetings with our customers anyway, our clients anyway. It feels very easy to organize, personally.

[00:03:01] Host: Great. I know for a lot of teams it gets parked because it just gets pushed off. So if you can follow those techniques and just do the upfront work, it'll pay off in terms of getting your pipeline going.

[00:03:16] Amy: Yes. These sessions are invaluable to us, so it makes so much sense to have them that the little bit of work you do have to put in to get them organized, and get anything in place for them, is just outweighed by the benefits.

Running unstructured, ethnographic sessions

[00:03:33] Host: Great. And then when you're running the actual session, you said it's unstructured, that you just say you're going to observe what people are doing. Does that always work, or do you need to get a bit more structured in terms of focusing on particular areas?

[00:03:52] Amy: It really depends on the client and their mood that day, if I'm perfectly honest. That's a little bit of the unknown, but actually that's the best part about it. If you've got a client who is in the mood to chat, then myself, or whoever's running that session, will spend a lot of the time being quiet and listening. However, if a client is having a tough day, or not in a space where they can easily discuss things, then you just unpack the reasons behind that, and it gives you the insights.

[00:04:28] We don't go into the sessions with a goal in mind very much, because we don't want to lead them. These are big, wide discovery sessions. Oh, I've bored my cat. How to describe this? They just allow us to uncover anything that's bothering the client at that moment. In so doing, we just have this ethnographic style. It's not us leading them; it's them coming to us with problems, or things that are going really well as well. It's very natural.

[00:05:15] Host: How often does it go off track, then, if you don't really have a particular goal or agenda? Let's say they're just in a bad mood because traffic was horrendous, back when people commuted, or something happened, a pipe burst at home or something like that. So it's nothing in any way related to your product. Do you get pulled off track sometimes, and how do you get it back to something relevant to you?

[00:05:41] Amy: You can ask guiding questions. Those things that are happening do actually inform some of your design decisions anyway. If you know that people regularly have short amounts of time, or they're distracted, or their environment is continuously changing, then you're going to make design decisions based on those insights. So they're insights in themselves. But you can ask simple guiding questions, like, "How has that affected your workday? Is there anything you've had to drop out of your workday because of that?"

[00:06:15] Just keep really open questions and be quite reactive. As the person during the interview, you just have to stay ready for anything. I love it. I think that's why we get so much out of them: we can just adapt to any situation and keep asking questions that get us insights.

Generative versus evaluative research

[00:06:38] Host: Great. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'd classify it as more generative research, where you're just trying to unpack things. Do you do evaluative research as well?

[00:06:50] Amy: Yes. We have separate research that is very much targeting a new feature or an idea we have, or testing some prototypes or even wireframes, and that is very much separate. These sessions are very good at giving us innovative ideas, getting to understand exactly what is going on in our clients' lives without them thinking of a solution, if that makes sense. They're coming to us with a pure problem. They're not coming to us and saying, "Can you just make it so that this works this way, please?" or, "This is a bug, can you fix it?"

[00:07:40] It's, "This process that we were going through took us a bit longer than I expected. Let me show you the process, let's talk it through. I'll share my screen, you can see exactly what I'm doing." And we say, "Thank you so much for that information." Then we go away and we work as product teams, engineering teams and customer teams to come up with an idea that could help with that friction.

[00:08:08] Host: Great. Just on that, how do you manage the risk that if they say, "I'm going to show you on your system," then you've already limited the scope of options, because they're going to talk about your system, whereas the problem might actually be separate to the system, or something that you need to do separately in order to solve it?

[00:08:31] Amy: That's a great question, and actually it's in how we prompt them to tell us about that problem. We want to know their entire process. They start by describing it. These are financial advisors, let's take this as an example: "One of my clients wanted to do this, and they wanted to, I don't know, transfer from this platform to this platform, and I was going through that process." Our product is a small part of that process, and we get to see, through their anecdotal or real examples, the whole lot of it.

[00:09:18] I think that's why it's great to keep it away from just looking at a feature, because you do get that whole story, even from, "I was late to work because I was stuck in traffic, so I rushed to do this, and I only had my iPad on me because my laptop's being worked on or something, and I managed to do this task." All of that extra information that you wouldn't normally get if you're just showing, "Here's a prototype, can you show us using it?"

[00:09:50] Host: Great. I really enjoyed that. I actually have loads more questions, so I might post some in the Ask the Speakers. That's also for the audience: please do post any questions in Ask the Speakers if you have any for Amy or any of our other speakers. Thank you very much, Amy, I really enjoyed that.

[00:10:05] Amy: Thank you.