Techno Musings

Not so long ago I read a story that stated many college students today appear to be lacking in empathy.  I suggest that you take a gander at the article, it is an interesting read. However, from talking to folks that live in New Orleans post Katrina they continue to say that there are many college students that have come down to give their all volunteering.   With that in mind, I cannot agree with the primary hypothesis of the article.  Regardless of my views the article got me to thinking about how empathy is an important factor in design.  Namely, understanding the user in your gut can ultimately lead to a better product design.  There are many books and studies that talk about empathy in design, here is a canned Google search for “empathy in design.”  One of the search results is a blog post from frog, where they engaged with Daimler execs to help the executives better understand their users in America.  frog had the execs interview 10 participants, who were Bay Area natives, and then asked the execs to take $50 and buy gifts encapsulating the needs and beliefs of the interviewees.  Perhaps because my middle name is Cameron, I was interested in the gift that one of the Daimler teams got Cam: a book on being an entrepreneur and $20 of left over funds.  The result of the interaction with Cam showed that there was a spark of empathy in the team that “got to know” Cam.  Other teams did not fare so well and bought <sarcasm type=”high grade”>things like souvenirs of San Francisco which of course everyone living the Bay Area needs</sarcasm>.  The most astonishing thing about the latter set of Daimler folk is that they did not understand why this was a bad idea, which represents one of the core reasons behind poorly designed products.

Recently Howard Marks wrote an article discussing Japanese firms, which follows an earlier blog post on NEC HYDRAstore.  Within the article he asks a question: why Japanese companies have not achieved more success in the US IT market.  Part of his central thesis is that these companies need to hire more US centric management teams to better “get in touch” with the US market for success to come.  This is another form of empathically understanding your users to design products, supply chains and business processes for them in their market, in this case the US.  You could easily turn the the thesis into knots and ask the question why US IT companies have not been as successful in Japan as the native ones, but let’s not go there.  Instead I’m going to basically agree with Howard and extend his argument. It is true that as an IT company, indeed even as a consumer company, you have to get in touch with your users by being able to empathize with them. To reach our users, on an empathic level, the Hitachi Storage Solutions group (including the Disk Array Systems Division, Hitachi Data Systems, and a few other Hitachi group companies) goes out and visits users with a diverse team — we include engineering representation, product designers/planners, and business owners.  Our visits or interviews are done across the variety of geographies including APAC, EMEA and the Americas.  (In fact we have a team heading out this month to get user input and validation on product concepts and directions.)  During the interview sessions we get requirements,validate concepts, and sometimes get profound input — an example of something profound is a need to create application specific file systems.  Between customers and geographies we even get conflicting inputs for the same thing. For example with respect to search we have conflicting requirements for privacy between the Americas and EMEA.  (Note, I won’t describe the conflict in detail or our solution to the problem, but I’ll say we are working on one.) Being successful in any market I think requires achievement of the thesis proposed by Howard that mandates an empathic spark of understanding of your users across the variety of geographies served.

To complete the discussion I want to briefly mention what I call true versus false empathy.  True empathy builds an experience which almost intuitively solves the user’s needs, even if it is counter to what they asked for.  False empathy is doing exactly what was asked for, but when they use the system they feel like something just isn’t right.  To get to true empathy you need to do things like usability testing which shows that sometimes while users express desires and needs in certain ways, their behaviors are completely counter to what they asked for.  For example if a customer wants a fancy industrial design, but when given the design cannot perform basic maintenance functions have you truly empathized with the user?  (Note Nigel hosted a good discussion on tricking out data center equipment with fancy industrial design.) Going back to Howard’s thesis and extending it a bit we can get closer to the answer of what is needed to make any IT company globally successful, including the US .  To be globally successful companies must reach out to each of the geographies and cultures they serve through local representation and management.  The locals are there to decode the geographic culture and translate into the corporate culture.  Further because they are local it is easier for them to experience real true empathy.  For example in some cases communication (both verbal and non-verbal) has different meanings such as a yes that may not really mean yes, or a head bobble that seems to say yes but means maybe, or a laugh that is not a response to humor but a signal of nervousness.  In this way, I think we can start to see why Hitachi Data Systems and other global portions of Hitachi have been successful, we’ve been able to create local presences in many of the places our users live so that we can empathically understand them in their own way to solve their problems.