Listen Like You Mean It by Ximena Vengoechea

Author:Ximena Vengoechea [Vengoechea, Ximena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

BEFORE YOU FORGET

To tap into our greatest empathetic selves, we need to stay flexible and open in conversation. When our conversation takes a detour or does not go as expected, throwing away our script can get us closer to the connection we are looking for. Our conversations may look different than we’d imagined, but they’ll still be just as meaningful as, if not more meaningful than, before.

CHAPTER 7

Confirm Your Comprehension

My team and I were conducting field research on how people shop, and each participant had agreed to host us in their home for an afternoon. We would be spending a whopping three hours together at each site, so we tried to keep things interactive.

Marta, one of our participants, showed us some of her most recent purchases: shoes made from recycled material from a trendy local start-up, lipstick made with all-natural ingredients and absolutely no animal testing, denim made in the United States, and an expensive but beautifully crafted jacket with hand stitching and embroidered details. As an artist herself, Marta explained, she valued craftsmanship in design—and was willing to pay for it. She also regularly read up on brands of interest before purchasing and made sure the businesses she shopped at shared similar values to her own.

The closet walk-through complete, we now had just a few formal questions for Marta before returning to the office. We showed her our prototype and asked her to try it out. Oliver, the product manager in charge of bringing this product to life, was particularly excited about leveraging a voice-activation feature in our prototype (We can help people shop hands-free!), but given what Marta had told us of her shopping process, I suspected it might be a little too newfangled for her purposes; we would have to wait and see.

Marta made her way through our prototype and was fairly positive in her feedback. She preferred a larger image so she could better see the details of what she was shopping for, she said, but yes, she could see herself using this.

As Marta continued to poke around, Oliver whispered in my ear, “Thumbs-up on voice activation!” Marta hadn’t called that feature out specifically, so I was surprised to hear Oliver felt it was a given, but perhaps I had missed it. I did not share Oliver’s confidence that Marta would leverage voice activation; she had mentioned the importance of really understanding the materials behind her purchases as well as the craftsmanship, and voice-activated shopping would seem to undercut that process. At the risk of walking away with muddled information (and misleading Oliver), I needed to clarify exactly what she thought.

“It seems like it would be helpful to have a bit more visual detail to vet the garment you’re considering,” I said, reflecting back what I had heard.

“Yes,” Marta said, “it’s important to me that it’s high quality.”

“Great. What else?” I asked. Marta mentioned a few details she appreciated—being able to purchase directly in-app, for one, made shopping easier.

“The convenience of purchasing within the app is appealing to you,” I said, once more reflecting back what I heard.

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