 My name is David Springay, and I've been working in user experience for about 15 years. Now, at the start of my career, I was taught to conduct user research to get in touch with my customers and to develop a good understanding of what they were looking for, what their needs were, and what their problems were. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to try to convince you that I can have a greater impact on the services and products that I design by getting the key stakeholders in my organization to do the job for me. So in other words, instead of going out and doing it for myself, I want to get other people to do it like product managers and data scientists. So as you know, I work at a company called ZoomCar, and as the head of user experience, my job promotes simplicity, value, and delight. Unfortunately, I have a problem, so I work with a group of data fanatics. When I talk about simplicity, they look at the conversion file and talk about uplift. When I talk about delight, they talk about customer ratings. We use experiments to test our hypotheses, and we measure success to two decimal points. But we rarely talk about individual customers. If you don't know, ZoomCar is a car rental company. We have about 3,000 cars across India, and on a typical weekend, we probably rent out about 5,000 cars. The rental experience is really simple. Basically, you go to the ZoomCar website and you search for a car. We show you a selection, and then you book one. You can do it on your phone with an app, or you can do it in a browser. On the day of your trip, you go to a ZoomCar pickup site, and we have about 20 pickup sites in Bangalore, and then we have others across the country. We actually operate in about 25 different cities across the country. It's really simple. Most of our customers actually ride a two-wheeler to the site, or they take a cab, and when they get there, they open up our app, and they find their car, and they push a button on the app, and that unlocks the door. It's literally like turning on your television set. You get in, you do an inspection, and you can go. On a given week, actually, so if you think about it, on a weekend we have 3,000 cars, we have 5,000 bookings. It's very difficult for a human to comprehend all of this activity. What we do is we use analytics to roll up reports. And on any given day, if you look in my email box, you're going to see that I've got 20 different reports. So, for instance, I can find out how many people visited our website, and I can find out how many sessions we had within our app. I can find out how many searches they did, and I can find out how many bookings they made. I can also find out how much they paid, how much we're charging extra when they return their cars, and I can find out how much refunds we're giving. I can look at current vehicle utilization, I can look at future vehicle utilization, and if I have any time left in my day after looking at reports, I can also find out what they're complaining about. So, as you can imagine, the reports are overwhelming. About six months ago, my manager came to me. My manager is the chief product officer at Zoomcar. He came to me and he said, Dave, we spend too much time talking about data. I need you to put a face on the numbers. I need you to help us build empathy at Zoomcar. For instance, I've talked about the number of cars we have and the number of customers. When you think about it, over a week, our customers make 10,000 trips in our vehicles. And like all vehicles, our vehicles, to be honest, sometimes they break down and sometimes they get involved in accidents. And on any given week, somewhere between 20 and 50 cars are stuck on the side of the road. So, if I take the middle of that, that's 35 cars in 10,000. That is 0.35% of our cars are broken down. That doesn't seem like a large number. But actually, if you think of it in human terms, it becomes a different story. Don't think about it as a car. Think about it as a family. And if a family is on vacation and their car breaks down on the side of the road, it's a disaster. You're going to have kids crying, you're going to have parents crying, and they're going to think twice about ever booking a Zoomcar again. So, my manager asked me to look at how we can put a face on the numbers or how we can build empathy. So, what is empathy? Well, according to the Interaction Design Foundation, empathy is our ability to see the world through another person's eyes, to see what they see, to feel what they feel, and to understand what they're thinking. In the user research community, we have been conducting exercises for years in order to build empathy. Basically, you look for ways to observe your customers. You watch them using your software, and you start to understand who they are. And if you do this enough, you just naturally build empathy. You understand what their needs are and what their problems are. Now, from a design standpoint, if you really understand what their needs are, you can create great services and products. But if you don't, you're going to create services and products which fail in the marketplace. For many of us, we're not actually creating new services. We're actually trying to improve existing services. Once again, if you understand what problems they have, then you can make improvements to your experience. So, how do you get a group of people who are fanatical about data to focus on individual customers? Fortunately, the person who asked me to do this was the Chief Product Officer. So, he has a group of about 15 to 20 product managers and data scientists and my own design team, and they all report to him. We meet once a week. We started out by looking at this as kind of a design team activity. We were planning to go out to our site, observe pickups, interview customers, do a survey, and then put together personas. But he came to me one day and he said, Dave, I think everybody on the team should do something. And then he suggested that we meet once a week. Why don't you talk to the team and see what you can do? So, we met a week later and what we did was we started out with an introduction to empathy. So, just like I talked with you about what empathy is, I spoke with the product team and I said, this is what empathy is and this is why it's important. And now let's talk about how we can actually increase our empathy within the Zoom Car product team. Now, it's one thing to prescribe how we do this, but my preference is actually to throw a problem out there and get the team to solve it for me because it creates a much more diverse set of ideas and it promotes buy-in. That's what we did. Basically, we ran kind of a design studio in about half an hour where I asked everybody on the team to generate five ideas of how they would increase their contact with customers, how they would get in touch with customers. We had 20 people in the room. We all broke up and then they formed smaller teams to share ideas and each team actually brought forward five ideas. So, by the time we converged, we had 20 ideas which had been shared and vetted. And then out of that, we created a four-step plan. So, first of all, I was very lucky that my chief product officer actually sponsored this. But what the team suggested is, first of all, everybody on our team needs to connect or get out once a month. And we have a variety of different ways that you can do this. Now, we're all doing this either on an individual basis or in teams and we're getting one or two pieces of data, one or two pieces of information. What we decided was that we needed to share what we learned. So, we share what we learned and then we track participation. Our goal is to make an impact. We're not doing this because we're nice people. We're doing this because we want to improve the customer experience. So, we came up with seven different ways to do this and I'm going to go through some of these. I'm not going to go through them all in detail. First of all, we ask all of our new employees to rent a Zoom car. This is a great way for our new product managers, data scientists and design team members to explore what the end-to-end experience is. We ask them to record their experiences either with written notes, photographs or videos and then bring that back to us. So, for instance, this is a photograph from the first time I ever visited a Zoom car pickup site. Coming from North America was a bit of a surprise to me. There was a lot of dust. We also encourage people to take photographs of the inside of the car because as a product team we spend 90% of our time thinking about the online experience but our customers spend 90% of their time sitting inside the vehicle and driving it. So, it's important to get that perspective and we take screen snapshots. We also encourage all of our employees to work at a pickup site for one day. Now, this could be in the first month or the second month that's entirely up to them. So, this is a great way to actually engage with your customers because they come to you and you can observe them pick up the cars or drop off the cars. Usually it only takes one customer to book a car but what we find is that three, four or ten people come to pick up the car. For instance, I once saw a group of eleven people come and pick up a Zoom car and they fit themselves inside because this is India. The other thing which we do is we encourage people to work in customer support and the reason is because it's a great way to find out what the pain points are experienced. So, for instance, if they have trouble actually finding the car, they call us. If they have disputes about damage claims or expenses, they call us and if the car breaks down, they'll phone us half a dozen times. They'll phone us once to say the car is broken down then they'll call us again to say when is roadside or fifth coming. The final thing we do is we shadow our customers. So, we phone them up. What we do is we phone people up after they and we ask them about their booking and then we ask them about their trip and then if they're willing we'll actually meet them at the pickup site. So, everything I've talked about here is I would describe it as small data. We're meeting with one or two customers but we actually use big data to connect with our customers too. So, for instance, we can use our database to identify our most frequent users or customers within India and once we have this data, we invite them we can invite them out to a pub where we get to know them on an individual basis. What we do, what we've done in the past is we ask them to draw essentially a user journey of their last trip and then we explore ways with them that we can improve it. So, I talked about the individual research it's also important for us to share what we learn and the reason we do this is so that we can essentially understand the different individual points and look for patterns. We're also accountable for this so we track participation. So, this is what we call our wall of fame. It initially started out as a wall of shame. We ask everybody to put their name up on this chart to identify what they're going to do once a month and at the end of the month we count the number of people on the right-hand side. So, it's very visible that we expect everybody to do this. So, lessons learned. First of all, we learned it's easy to get started. It doesn't really take a degree in human-computer interaction to rent a car or to get out and observe your customers at the site. That is believing. So, it's amazing how you can learn about things and get a greater understanding of what your customers are experiencing by just watching them. Third, it's not always clear how you should get in touch with customers. So, we're dealing with a lot of data scientists and product managers. And fourth, we use a lunch turn and what we found is it's only an hour long. So, to address these we've created essentially a research guide which contains one page for every activity which we do so that when our product managers come up to us and ask us how should we conduct research out of site we give them this page. The other thing we do is we have a presentation guide where we basically say we want you to talk about what you did, what you learned, and how you would improve our services. And we give them 10 minutes. So, we've been doing this for about three months now. After six weeks, actually, in the first week what we found is that there were a small number of cleaners or advocates who wanted to do this. The rest of the group, to be honest, weren't even sure if it was going to happen. After six weeks, what we found is we had seven people present their research in 75 minutes. There's very structured discussion and we had 20 people in the room, I would say, who were actually very engaged. So, lessons learned. First of all, if you're going to lead an activity like this you need to manage your contributions proactively. You need to make sure people are doing a variety of things. That way, when people come to the room they get value out of it. Second, after a couple of weeks you start to hear the same stories. When we hear about an issue or a user experience twice, it's a signal. When we hear about an issue three times that's when we take action. And we maintain documents where we are capturing issues and looking for patterns. As I said, empathy is not an end goal. It's a means to an end. And from a design perspective we can use this to move discussions forward to actually get a product team to take action. We also find that many of the issues which we see cut across organizations. We have an online organization and an operational organization. What we've discovered is that if we don't have the right organization in the room our issues stop. So it's critical to have all of our organizations in the room. Okay, so I want to review with a story. So, about three weeks ago one of the product managers on my team came to me and asked to meet with me and the... Sorry, you guys gave me 12 minutes. No, okay. So anyways, okay. So what did we learn? So they came to me and the product manager came to me and the head of data analytics and said, we have a problem. We've noticed that our customers are leaving. This is normal turn, but we'd like to understand why they've left us. So I'd like your help to create a survey. To my pleasant surprise the head of data analytics responded by saying, you know, we could create a survey but that's not actually a good way to find out why our customers are leaving. What we could do is we could actually use our database to identify 20 customers and give them a call. We can connect with them explore why they left us and then explore how we could give them how we could recover them. We could use empathy. So I started out this talk by saying that I didn't think it was useful to actually go out and do your research yourself. But that was a little bit of a lie. As a user, it's critical for us to get out there. But I also believe that by asking the key stakeholders within your organization to do research to, we will have a greater impact upon the user experience with our product. Thank you. Thank you.