I'm All Ears

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEEP LISTENING IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

WRITTEN BY: STEVE CLEMENTS, DIRECTOR, EXPERIENCE DESIGN, BOTTLE ROCKET

Deep listening drives innovation. It is one of the most important skills any Strategist and Experience Designer can possess in the design thinking process. To create a design solution, you must listen, observe, and process a large volume of data points in a short period of time to have enough foundational knowledge to ideate upon. This sounds basic and straightforward, but I am referring to those golden comments that come either from the client, or even more likely from the end user, that unlock some key understanding and/or insight in every project.

Listen now. When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.” – Ernest Hemingway

Bottle Rocket is working to transform customer experience in industries spanning healthcare, grocery/retail, and QSR, just to name a few. We are constantly listening to find the key moments of interaction, transition, and reward that we can improve and ideally transform. Quickly learning a new client’s business, addressing their objectives, and creating the MVP within a project team are all mission critical.

But what about the customers’ needs, spoken and, equally as important, unspoken? How do we inspire the customer? What do we learn when we observe customer behavior? And how can we use that to make something that matters?

Who knew, listening was such hard work?

Hearing what isn’t said can be used to create what is affectionately called “surprise and delight.” During any project, we will identify the customer touch points, journeys, and required transactions. Oftentimes, the key is identifying the micro-moments between interactions, finding the “one thing” than can elevate an experience from good to great, from expected to memorable, from generic to ownable for a brand.

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” – Peter Drucker

How well can we create a meaningful set of personas? How far can we “rewind” the customer journey with ethnographic and field research? How many “right” questions can we ask (in our limited timeframe) to get the answers that unlock some key friction points or that provide a eureka moment (which, by the way, is very hard to do).

It all starts with listening – discovery sessions, SME interviews, prototype testing with the target audience. Bottle Rocket has built a significant part of its 13-year reputation on the successful results created by these capabilities and techniques.

I’m not a detective, but I play one on TV.

I often feel like my job skills lie somewhere between that of a detective and psychologist. We have all watched movies where the eccentric detective has some crazy collage style wall with yarn and thumbtacks identifying suspects, relationships, behaviors, and gaps. That’s us.

That’s what makes Experience Design as a discipline so intriguing.

Like the Sherlock Holmes character who “… refers to himself as a ‘consulting detective’ in the stories, he is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic.” (Source: Wikipedia).

In our case, I would just define “fantastic” as applying our creative thinking to surprise and delight clients. We go deep to create things that matter.

“Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.” – Sherlock Holmes

Our department is optimized around three core groups: Strategy, Visual Design, and User Research. Each has its own unique and complementary skill set and traits. By design, we are not dogmatic in how we solve design problems. We just listen to the client’s needs, leverage our collective team’s superpowers, and use the XD techniques and tools that work for that situation. Our deep listening culture starts with our hiring process. When hiring new XD Rocketeers, two key professional traits we look for are humility and courage.

Both support the deep listening mindset very well. We must have courage to embrace the impossible and ask the tough questions (two of Bottle Rocket’s core values) and have the humility to listen and accept new information, requirements, and ideas from wherever they originate.

Like any great jazz song, creative improvisation and intuitive collaboration starts with deep listening. In our pandemic world, where remote working and feelings of isolation abound, working together has never been more challenging. How well we deeply listen, to both our clients and the end customer, can be the game-changer.