David Springgay

Dave is a Senior User Experience Consultant, and Head of User Experience at Zoomcar. He has held design and development leadership roles for the past 20 years, with a history of engagement at The Times of London, The Sunday Times, Transport for London, IBM, Charles Schwab, Ericsson, and the educational community.

Building Empathy at Zoomcar

18 min TED like Talk | Categeory: UX | Target Audience: Design teams at tech startups and established companies, Design leaders who want to transform the way product ideation is approached, Product managers who want to define and build better products

Empathy is the foundation for great product and experience design. In 2017 the Zoomcar Design Team launched a new initiative to build customer empathy across Zoomcar. We met with the product team and put together a plan, where everybody was required to get out, engage with customers at various touch points in their journey, and bring their new understanding back to the team. This wasn’t just an educational exercise. We wanted to make an impact. In this talk, I look at why we did it, how we did it, and what the results were upon customer experience and the bottom line. I'll also look at what we learned, and what we would do differently next time.

Three key takeaways

• It's still early days for us, but here are some ideas to get started. Many people think that customer research can be used to prove that their favorite idea is correct. The truth is, we should all be prepared to discover that our favorite idea is wrong. Great discoveries begin when you close your mouth and open your eyes.

• Customer research is a team activity. It’s important for everybody on the product team, regardless of their role, to observe the customer in a variety of ways. This is how you turn skeptics into customer advocates.

• And finally, empathy is not the end. It’s a means to an end. It’s just as important to convert your new found understanding into action, and this is where things get hard. Really hard.