Parent: Design Thinking
The empathize phase isn’t just for designing reports, logos, or websites. This phase if often the most under looked step for most developers.
The biggest trap when making anything (pipelines, reports, applications) is to jump straight in to development without first answering “What” you should be developing.
The challenge is how can you deeply understand your stakeholders world: Their pains, their needs, their wants, before you start developing a line of code.
This comes through actually standing on their shoes, or at least living in their world just for a period of time. Observe, observe, observe. Spend 30 minutes shadowing them work, look at the reports that they are currently seeing, actually ask them “what do you check first thing monday morning?“. Ask about the person, not the report.
Read through their domain of work, if its a finance dashboard study the metrics, trends, etc. Revisit after launch and see their pains and misgivings on the report.
Your job
is to understand the person, not the tool.
Empathy questions:
- What pressures is this person under?
- What decisions do they need to make? how frequent?
- What does success look like to them?
- What information do they currently lack?
- What media do they use to consume information? Mobile? Web? TV Dashboard?
Ask yourself, what is this person trying to achieve from this tool?
- They want to look good to their superiors - happens a lot, this guy needs you to showcase the strengths of their project
- They want to feedback other people in their division - usually operations people, their job is monitor and control. This guy needs you to show the weaknesses inside of a process
- They want to justify headcount/budget - you need to show how much impact and how much resources are needed to keep this project going.
You might just find that by making a report that is tailored to the users needs that it ends up being a much simpler job than you first expected.
Empathizing with MH02 Stakeholders - Report building