Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

The author of this book believes he's come up with a simple, surefire way to design products and services that connect with consumers on a deep level.

"Well Designed" shows readers how to conceive and build innovative products and services that appeal to people's emotions so they keep coming back for more. It sets out a step-by-step design process based around research into human behavior, attitudes, and aspirations that'll ensure your next offering hits the sweet spot.

So who's this book for? It's primarily aimed at people involved in product design or development, particularly in the digital field. It'll help designers tap bigger and better markets and increase their profitability. It's also for those involved in marketing and brand management or anyone tasked with making sure a product is a good fit for the market.

But many of its lessons have a broader relevance, and anyone who wants to learn how to connect more deeply with potential customers will find value in this book. Readers who aren't involved in digital product design or marketing may prefer to skip some of the more specialized sections.

The author, Jon Kolko, is an expert in design who's worked with start-ups and Fortune 500 companies across a range of industries. He's vice president of product, innovation, and design at MyEdu, an Austin, Texas-based company that helps students explore education and career options.

Kolko is also founder and director of the Austin Center for Design. He specializes in design for social enterprises, with a focus on entrepreneurship and large-scale industry disruption.

So keep listening to hear how to put the user experience at the heart of your market research, how to write a value statement that has empathy at its core, and how to support your customers once you've launched your product or service.

"Well Designed" has a few interesting features we'd like to flag up first. One is the story of a fictional character called Joe that runs throughout the book.

We first meet Joe at the beginning, when he's just quit his job to head up product development at a health and wellness start-up. We join him when he meets potential clients, feel his frustration as his newly launched wellness app runs into problems, and celebrate with him when his product becomes a success.

We like how the author uses Joe's journey to explore the various stages of product development. Joe is a likable character whose emotional rollercoaster ride will be familiar to anyone who's taken a product from the idea phase to market. There's fear, worry, excitement, stress, and elation, late nights and headaches. This narrative humanizes the author's theories and underpins his idea that products, including books like this one, need to engage with people at a deep level.

The author also ends each chapter with an in-depth interview with an expert in product development. We particularly like his discussion with Joe Gebbia, chief product designer at Airbnb, a business that's shaking up the global hospitality industry.

These interviews help readers understand what works and what doesn't, out there in the real world. One criticism here is that some of the interviews go on too long – the answers could have been edited down to be shorter and snappier. But overall, these expert insights add perspective.

So let's take a closer look at the book's content.

"Well Designed" sets out a four-step approach to product design that has empathy at its core. The first step is to determine a product-market fit, by observing and embracing signals from users such as changes in attitude. Second is understand people's behavior, by conducting research out in the field. The third step is sketch a product strategy, by turning your behavioral research into simple insights. And finally, finesse the details of your product, by using visual representations to simplify complex ideas.

We particularly like the author's suggestions on how to carry out effective market research.

Understanding and empathy are key. Identifying with the feelings, behaviors, and dreams of your potential customers will help you create products that engage with people in a meaningful way and are a good match for their needs.

If you really want to know what it feels like to be an eighty-five-year-old woman who's trying to drive, you have to put yourself in her shoes. You could go out driving with her, ask her what it feels like as she navigates traffic or reverses the car.

You could impair your vision by wearing glasses smeared with Vaseline, or you could simulate joint pain by taping up your fingers – provided you stay safe, of course! The point is to stop seeing the world through your own lens and to start seeing it through hers.

When you set out to observe people's behavior, it's good to decide a focus first. Maybe you want to learn how people use banking services, shop for shoes online, or fit exercise into their lunch hour. This focus puts a boundary around your research.

It's also a good idea to write out a set of ten, open-ended questions. Memorize the gist of them and try not to read them off a piece of paper when talking to people – although you can keep the list handy as a backup, in case your interviews don't go to plan.

Good questions refer to real rather than hypothetical events, and prompt people to recall bad situations or negative feelings, as they're easier to remember. Good examples include: Can you show me how you to use this software to buy a pair of shoes? What's your least favorite part of shopping at this store? Can you tell me the last time your car broke down and which part broke?

If your interviewee mentions a product, a process, or a piece of software, ask to see examples. It's also a good idea to ask to try something out. So if your participant is searching for and buying shoes online, ask if you can have a go on the same website – you don't have to hit the buy button.

Two final tips: make sure you're doing your research where the behavior actually happens. So you'll want to be in the store, at the gym, in the bank, or sitting in front of a computer with a user. And capture the experience in as many ways as you can – ask permission to record their voice, take photographs, or video. This will give you a rich set of data to work with.

We like these suggestions. They're practical – and they also drive home the author's point on empathy. It's clear this kind of market research is much more useful than written surveys or data collected over the phone, although it's important to note it'll be more costly and time-consuming.

Once you have your product idea, it's time to draw up a product design strategy. The first step is to write what the author calls an ‘emotional value proposition,' which is a promise to produce value for a customer. This will help shape the product through the design process and will form the basis of your marketing strategy. It's like a mission statement.

To identify what you're offering, ask yourself this question: what can someone do after using or buying my product that they couldn't do before?

But asking what people can do after using your product is just half the story. These days, people buy products or services not just because of what they do, but because of how they make them feel – once again, Apple is a good example. So the author suggests you also ask: what will a person feel after using or buying my product that they didn't feel before?

Let's return to Joe to see this in action. Joe's app, called LiveWell, aims to help people track their stress levels. His value proposition reads: "After using LiveWell, people can better track the way they feel throughout the day and connect those feelings to events or activities in their lives."

But his emotional value proposition reads: "After using LiveWell, people will feel more connected with their body rhythms and will feel more in control of their mental health." Can you hear the difference in emphasis?

You'll also want to give your product emotional traits. Your product isn't human but customers often assign human characteristics to things they love. They see them as friends, cherish them, miss them when they're not around, and swear at them when they don't work.

The author suggests identifying four or five specific traits to describe your product. To bring this point to life, he compares the Lexus to the Mini Cooper. The Lexus aspires to be luxurious, sensual, elegant, and slightly out of reach, while the Mini Cooper wants to be seen as playful, lighthearted, and free. These traits are reflected in the cars' design, marketing, and advertising – think about the colors of the Lexus versus the Mini, or the music used in TV ads.

We think this emphasis on how the customer feels is really helpful and we like how the author illustrates his points using clear examples many readers can relate to.

Let's now jump to the end of the process. You've launched your product and customers are coming on board. So what next? It's vital at this stage to find out whether you've achieved your goals – whether you're delivering on your emotional value proposition. You need to devise some form of tracking method to check this. This will be different for every product, so let's return to Joe's LiveWell app to get an idea of what might work.

For Joe, it's not enough to know how many people are logging in to the app. He needs to know whether people actually feel more connected with their body and in better control of their mental health. He can start to gage this by tracking how many users renew their monthly membership after the first month, a statistic he calls the "happy customer percentage". If a customer pays for a month and then actively decides to pay for a second month, rather than being billed automatically, he knows he's provided value for his customer.

He can also see whether users are making behavioral shifts after using the app, by tracking a score that goes up as they make positive changes. He can then take an average of this number across all users. This figure indicates the wellness levels of his global community of users. If the product is achieving its goal, that number should go up.

You'll also want to track the number of bugs or defects users report – and fix them immediately. If you've been working around the clock to get a product out the door, it's all too easy to take your foot off the gas once you've launched. But a design-driven approach to product development means you have to care about every aspect of the user experience. There's an endless list of things that could turn customers off, from how the product looks, to pricing, language and content, to the way information is displayed.

In Joe's case, he discovers large numbers of users are abandoning registration half way through the process. He launches the app, logs on as a new user, and discovers the system isn't working in the way it was designed. Fortunately, he can alert his product engineers and fix it fast.

Once again, Joe's story brings the process to life and helps readers understand how to keep customers on board. As Joe learns from his mistakes, we learn too, and we think the author does a really good job of combining Joe's fictional journey with facts, theories and interviews from the real world of product design.

This book's focus is on digital products and some will argue it's quite niche. We'd have liked more case studies or input from non-digital industries. This would have given the book a broader reach and made it easy to transfer its theories to other sectors.

But the author says his design method is just as effective for creating new services, and coming up with policies, strategies, or business models in other areas. And we agree that building understanding and empathy with people and really getting to the bottom of customers' behavior and attitudes by putting ourselves in their shoes is a great recipe for success.

"Well Designed" by Jon Kolko is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.