Improving Documentation with Customer Empathy
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Audience analysis is at the heart of what technical writers do. But what makes an audience analysis truly successful? Empathy. Customer empathy spans more than customer service; in fact, it's most needed long before a user even calls for help. By employing empathetic techniques -- for example, monitoring customer support cases to find pain points and improve documentation to address them -- your users will learn to trust your documentation and seek it out before calling customer support. This presentation covers how to acquire user empathy and effectively create empathetic technical information. It discusses several empathetic techniques you can use in your organization to start writing with a better understanding of your users' pain. It also discusses the case studies, collaboration, and user outreach Extreme Networks performed and the results of these activities.
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Improving Documentation with Customer Empathy
- 1. Christina Mayr Information Architect Larry Kunz Lead Technical Writer Extreme Networks
- 3. The hierarchy of documentation needs Available & Functional Documentation exists and can be accessed by readers Accurate Content is correct, accurate, and of high quality Appropriate Content is written and delivered the best way possible Connected Readers are engaged with content; writers are engaged with readers Catalytic Allows readers to do more or better
- 4. CUSTOMER EMPATHY AT IBM CEO had real empathy from being IBM’s customer
- 5. CUSTOMER EMPATHY AT ZILDJIAN Website reflects the company’s mission
- 6. CUSTOMER EMPATHY AT DELTA Not having empathy leads to bad business decisions
- 7. em ● pa ● thy The ability to identify with or vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. There are two types: Basic Empathy: Re-enactive Empathy: : “I understand that you are frustrated.” : “I understand why you are frustrated.” This is the type of empathy that allows us to truly understand others.* A mental reenactment or imitation of the thought processes of people to fully understand and explain them. The recognition of emotions felt by other people.
- 8. Empathy in technical communication Photo: Master1305 / Shutterstock
- 9. Discovering customer needs & pain points
- 12. Collaborate with customer support Use the products you write about Solicit and act on feedback Attend a customer conference
- 14. Attend customer training Do a guided review Perform a small user test Attend customer trainingCreate a user advisory board Perform a small user test
- 17. EMPATHETIC LISTENING What are they really feeling (but not saying)?
- 18. ROLE REVERS AL
- 19. Empathy Maps Empathy maps Thinks & Feels SeesDoes Says Pain Points Goals Learn more at www.nngroup.com User
- 20. Gustav Thinks & Feels SeesDoes Says Pain Points Goals Wants to understand how products work “under the hood” so he can make the products fit his environment and improve them. “I am active in the user community and can generally assist other users faster than technical support can.” “I am a tinkerer in everything I do. Before I use a new bicycle, I take it apart to understand all its parts.” “I know more about these products than some of the employees.” “I’m very fond of the products, just not the documentation.” “I’m an asset to the company and don’t understand why it takes so long to make necessary improvements.” The documentation provided is not technical or detailed enough to be useful. Doesn’t know if his feedback is being heard or used. Spends a lot of time alone as the only network administrator in his company. Communication with other users is frequent but only virtual. Skims and searches documentation looking for advanced examples. Designs networks for small European companies, typically using the product differently than designed. Frequently answers similar questions from other users. Writes user-specific documentation.
- 21. Using the empathy map Communicate personas for shared understanding Develop audience, purpose, and task analyses based on findings Create conditionalized content to address different audiences Incorporate user content into official documentation Foster meaningful innovation
- 23. Questions? Thank You! @larry_kunz @extremedocs @christinaemayr
Editor's Notes
- Larry intro
- Larry intro to poll & comment What amount of access to your readers do you currently have? Select the one that is closest to your situation. Frequently and directly Occasionally Through intermediaries (e.g., customer support) I don’t even know who reads my stuff!
- Christina What do we mean when we say ‘improve’ documentation? In this case, having empathy for your readers will help you assess your content for gaps or quality issues and move it up to the next level. The very basic necessity for documentation is that your readers to access, and that it works. The PDF you have on your website is relatively easy to find and opens without issue. The next step is that the document is accurate. Most of us strive for accuracy to be our bare minimum. If the document is accurate, the next improvement is appropriate content and delivery for your audience. Many of us have been taught to use audience, purpose, and task analyses to ensure our documents are appropriate. Later in this talk we’ll show you a different way to assess for appropriateness using an empathy map. The next two steps are where many of us are striving to take our documentation. Connected means that our content is engaged with our customers, and we are engaged with them. This can mean direct feedback channels, user-generated content, or even social media engagements. Connected can also mean that content is connected to internal databases or automated processes. For example, software commands are populated directly from the code instead of copied and pasted from Word documents. The last step is catalytic, which means that your documentation enables your reader to do their jobs better, faster, or with more accuracy. The goal is for the documentation to be so intuitive and easy to use that the reader runs into few problems, and if they do, they are easily solved so the reader can get back to using the product.
- In the book “Wired to Care,” Dev Patnaik relates several accounts of companies successfully – or not so successfully – seeking to understand their customers and making better business decisions. One such company is IBM’s CEO, who, when faced with pressure from the Board to change their customer focus, decided to relate his experience with IBM as a former customer. Because of his empathy toward IBM’s customers, he kept the focus on them with great success.
- Also in the book, Patnaik tells the story of the drum cymbal company Zildjian (zil-jen). The author relates a story about how the company re-focused their mission on drummers and music artists. Their CEO and executives spent a lot of time talking with drummers about their music and the cymbals, gaining valuable feedback and a deep view into their world. You can see their focus on artists on their website home-page, shown here, that instead of focusing on their products, they invite you to search for an artist who presumably uses Zildjian cymbals. The company’s focus on the artists and their music has made Zildjian the number one cymbal company in the world.
- Our last story is a cautionary tale from Delta. Many of us have flown commercially and know that the hassles of airport security and small seats with not enough leg room makes flying difficult. The executives at Delta had always flown on their most luxurious planes, and always first class. They boarded before everyone, had plenty of room to sleep, work, and eat, and were unempathetic to the way their customers fly. In talks of improving the airline travel experiences, these same executives chose not to make economy sections better because of their lack of true understanding. Don’t let this happen to you!
- 1:45 Christina So, when we talk about empathy, what do we mean? There are two ways to understand the feels, thoughts, or attitudes of someone else. Basic empathy allows us to recognize other creatures as minded, and recognize them as being similar to us. It is our ability to attribute certain mental states to the person we are observing. For example, it allows us to recognize that another person is angry, or that he or she intends to do something. However, this mechanism does not account for our understanding of why that person is angry or why he or she is acting a certain way. Thus, another component is needed. Reenactive empathy is a mechanism by which we use our cognitive and deliberative abilities to reenact or imitate the thought processes of another person in our own mind. It is this mechanism that allows us to consider the other person’s more complex social behaviors as behavior of a rational agent acting with reason. Larry will now talk about how empathy applies to technical communication.
- Larry Why is empathy important in tech comm? What is your reader’s state of mind? You are not your reader / your reader's world is different from yours Your reader has a full package of emotions, thoughts, and expectations Your content is effective only when it reaches the reader on all these levels Understand that you are not your reader (Menno De Jong / Leo Lentz) As technical writers, we tend to think that we innately understand our readers. But we have different: Familiarity with the genre Prior knowledge Perspective/objective: product developer vs. network admin Evaluation standards: what are your criteria for success? how do you measure them? You: technical accuracy, internal reviews Reader: getting my job done, confidence in the info
- Larry When you imagine your reader, what do you think their state of mind is? Calm (stress free) Rational Ready to learn the information The real-life reader brings a full package of: Emotions - maybe they're feeling pressure Thoughts - maybe they lack confidence; maybe they're distracted Expectations - they want you to tell them how to get started… …or they want that one bit of information they need to finish the task Your content needs to reach the reader on all these levels Leon Segal Get into your customer's world. Who are the other people affected by your decisions? Example 1: Designing a mobile phone? If your customer has small children, little hands will certainly pick it up. Example 2: Developing a new medical device for in-home use? It will probably be used not only by the patient, but also by various caretakers… …ranging from professional nurses to relative, friends, and neighbors. Reaching the reader on all these levels isn't easy, and it has to be intentional. Today we'll help you talk about reader-focused reevaluation research and develop empathic skills.
- Larry Empathy has to be part of the organization's commitment. Evaluate content based on feedback, not on the content’s intrinsic qualities (Shriver) How does your organization evaluate the quality of its content? Time to market Technical accuracy Word counts, readability indexes Internal usability tests
- 1:55 Larry – Christina and I will talk about specific techniques we’ve used and you can try to bring empathy into your technical communication.
- Collaborate with customer support (Christina) Developing a relationship with customer support is critical to improving your empathy. Customer support has direct access to customers, and have first-hand knowledge of pain points that can help improve your documentation. At Extreme, we collaborate with technical support to write new guides or create videos for common or business-critical issues. We use support case metrics to determine issues that can be addressed quickly and have a major impact to many customers. Other ways to interact with customer support: Shadow different customer support engineers or listen to support calls Include customer support on document reviews Implement a process to communicate documentation problems directly to the responsible author (while waiting on the formal bug/enhancement process to happen in the background) Solicit and act on feedback (Christina) In 2016, the Information Development team at Extreme put together a survey about our documentation and how it’s used. We sent the survey to our user community. We turned the results into an infographic that we shared with both external customers and internal stakeholders. This resulted in greater collaboration with customer support, engineering, and professional services to deliver targeted content our users were asking for. Work with products direction (Larry) Get into the lab! Our manager authorized the purchase of 5 network switches By doing what the customer does, I develop empathy Unpacking exercise: to see what the customers see We involved the whole writing team - not just hardware writers - to get all viewpoints Is this what you expected? What first impressions did you have? Was anything hard about unpacking? We caught all of it on video Setup in the lab: to experience the installation process just as customers do We modified the printed installation instructions based on our experience We made a video for YouTube Follow up: We can move switches around, adjust cables, reconfigure the software All to test and refine our “maintenance” documentation Attend a user conference (Larry) Extreme will hold its first user conference in April 2018. Our writing team is preparing something for the demo floor and possible flyers/tchotchkes for networking. To start, we're focusing on what we've done that improved our customers' experience. We'll also use the conference to find ways to engage with our customers. Ideally, we'll start conversations that endure
- Larry to introduce poll – Which of these techniques have you or your company used to get closer to readers? Customer support collaboration Using the products Solicit user feedback Attend a customer conference Christina comment on poll as transition
- User Advisory Board (Christina) A user advisory board is made of up representative users for your product lines. The goal of the advisory board is to ensure your representative users’ needs and goals are being met while also serving as another official reviewer of your documentation. They can also be involved in creating new content and the board can be the perfect forum to start using the empathetic techniques we’ll be discussing in a moment. Meetings of the advisory board can happen in-person, virtually, even in conjunction with a user conference. Guided Review (Christina) A guided review is where a reviewer uses the documentation to perform a series of tasks while also providing feedback on the documentation. This is similar to a user test but your reviewer is generally an SME. This has the added benefit of the SME gaining empathy for the user while also potentially finding improvements to the product. Customer Training (Larry) Can you and your team members sit in on – audit – the training courses that your readers attend? This can be a great way to learn what they’re learning, and to network with your readers. User Test (Larry) Perform a user test, or usability test, to check the effectiveness of key parts of your content. If you can’t line up actual customers for the test, find someone who has similar domain knowledge to your audience. The test needn’t be lengthy or expensive. You can find out a lot by testing a small amount of content with two or three people.
- Larry introduce poll – Which of these techniques have you or your company used to get closer to readers? User advisory board Customer training Guided review User testing
- 2:05 Larry Alan Alda hosted Scientific American Frontiers on PBS Prepped for the interviews Boned up on the subject matter Results: Dull! Decided to have a conversation rather than an interview Tell the story of how you discovered x How did it feel to make that breakthrough? Scientists "started connecting on a personal level rather than delivering lectures" [my words]
- Larry Empathy = "the fundamental ingredient without which real communication can’t happen" (Alan Alda) Empathy is about all forms of communication - and technical communication is no exception Alda had been trained in acting technique Mirror exercise: 2 actors focus on each other and follow each other's lead "If I’m trying to explain something and you don’t follow me…. …it’s not simply your job to catch up. It’s my job to slow down." The "Yes, and…" dialog Closely related to the storytelling we do in tech comm Use it when interviewing SMEs: Read their faces What are they comfortable talking about? Excited about? Draw them out SME: "The flurbgurb feature optimizes the flow of bits through the router." You: "Yes, and my datacenter manager will be excited about that because…." ….and let your SME pick up the story from there
- Larry This is about putting yourself in someone else's shoes In this case, it's the reader's shoes Techniques: Active listening - having that conversation, as Alda did with the scientists Looking for a story - what is the reader experiencing? "Yes and…." Gets you out of your usual mindset Helps you create something together with the other person Throw to Christina
- 2:10 Christina An empathy map in UX design is a visual tool to articulate a user’s needs based on what they think, feel, see, do, say, and hear. Nielsen Norman Group developed the concept, and is fully explained on their website. The template shown here is our slightly modified version. The Thinks & Feels area captures what the user is thinking and feeling throughout the experience. Ask yourself: what occupies the reader’s thoughts? What matters to the reader? Pay special attention to what users think, but may not be willing to vocalize. Try to understand why they are reluctant to share — are they unsure, self-conscious, polite, or afraid to tell others something? What worries the reader? What does she get excited about? How does he about the experience? The Sees areas captures the context of the reader and how he interacts with the documentation. This can also capture how the reader accesses the documentation. Ask yourself: The Says area captures particularly helpful quotes from an interview or usability study. Ideally, it contains verbatim and direct quotes from research. The Does area records what the user does during a user test or how they generally interact with the documentation. Finally, the Pain Points and Goals areas capture the pain points discovered during user research and lists the user’s goals for using the documentation or product. You may find that your readers’ goals and your goals for writing the documentation may not match, so it’s good to find that out.
- Christina This empathy map we created is based on one of our super-users, Gustav, who is an outspoken customer and is prolific with useful feedback about our documentation to us and to other users. In a recent user survey we did, Gustav’s comments were especially helpful in creating a plan to address our more advanced readers. In our empathy map, we listed what Gustav does and says in the public forum but also in his private communications to us. We also included some environmental context to understand his interactions with the product a little more. Gustav will also be our first choice for when we create our customer advisory board.
- Christina Communicate personas to other stakeholders – an empathy map is a great way to succinctly present different personas and their needs to a larger group. Use empathy maps to develop audience, purpose, and task analyses – now that you are intimately familiar with your readers, you can alter your alter your documentation planning documents accordingly. Create conditionalized content (basic /advanced, internal v. external, etc.) – If you single-source your content, you can your user research to conditionalize your text based on audience, product, platform, location, and language. Incorporate user-submitted content into official guides – If you get a lot of feedback from your readers that is actionable, consider allowing them to more directly contribute to documentation improvement through reviewing or even writing new content. Foster meaningful innovation – user research is meant to drive innovation in the product and document design. Use your findings to take your documentation from appropriate, to connected, to catalytic. Throw to Larry for Summary
- 2:15 Summarizing the key points Larry Recognize that you're different from your reader Intentional - organization commitment Don't neglect traditional quality metrics, but add in customer feedback Learn empathetic skills & techniques Look at what the reader thinks and feels, not just what they say and do Practice active listening Project yourself into the reader's world: "Yes, and..." Christina Handout
- That’s it – thanks very much! We’re now happy to take any questions.