Design with empathy — make products customers love, even on a time crunch

It’s no secret that successful products are built by teams who understand their customers. But, in a time when product teams are under near-constant pressure to innovate faster than ever before, designers are put in a tough position—how do you balance meeting tight deadlines and keeping stakeholders happy while ensuring a deep understanding of the latest customer needs are built into your process?

In a perfect world, every UX designer would be given plenty of time and resources to conduct the studies needed to understand the needs, wants, and pain points of their product’s target audience. This level of customer-centricity allows product teams to collect insights that create a greater sense of empathy, trust, and loyalty with their customer base, which gives teams a huge leg up on building successful and well-loved products.

We know that designers don’t want to sacrifice customer empathy in order to meet deadlines. Thankfully, there are options to make the most out of the customer insights you already have.

Taking a non-customer-centric approach can tank your product

Companies are constantly pushing for innovative solutions to improve and expand their current product offerings. While barreling forward on improving your product sounds great on paper, blindly chasing innovation without consulting your customer base is a surefire way to create an expensive and resource-wasting flop.

That’s how brands like Segway and products like New Coke by Coca-Cola got into trouble—by creating new, innovative products their customers did not want or ask for.

In both cases, aggressive innovation was made without consumer insights. For Segway, the pitfall was a limited understanding of the actual demand for their product. Alternatively, Coca-Cola committed the cardinal sin of making fundamental changes to its product against the preferences of its customer base.

These products (and countless more) are the perfect example of the importance of customer insights acting as your North Star—showcasing just how dangerous forgoing customer empathy can be for long-term brand success.

Don’t let your team fall prey to the pull of continual (but unnecessary) innovation at the cost of your customer’s trust and loyalty. Instead, keep up with the break-neck pace of product development while still making empathetic and accurate decisions based on customer insights with the help of specialized AI tools.

AI helps designers make customer-centric decisions, even on a tight deadline

Artificial intelligence is changing the future of product innovation, especially in the context of helping designers make more meaningful, customer-focused decisions.

Cutting back on the amount of time and resources needed to properly understand your customer base, AI is helping revolutionize product design for the better in a few key ways:

Helping analyze large data sets

A lack of customer research is rarely the thing holding teams back from understanding their customers. Especially at larger orgs, the problem is finding something meaningful in piles of data. And knowing what feedback matters most.

When it comes to making sense of large volumes of qualitative feedback piling in from a wide variety of sources, this is where AI tools really shine. Capable of transcribing audio and video, summarizing text, highlighting themes, and tagging key moments, Dovetail’s AI analysis turns mountains and mountains of data into actionable insights you can easily digest, share with your team, and use for better decision making.

For the product designer on a time crunch, this is the best-case scenario—giving you access to the insights you need while also saving valuable time to reinvest in maintaining empathetic connections with customers, adjusting your research processes, and building your product.

Quickly identifying patterns across multiple feedback sources

Another obstacle is making sense of feedback when it’s coming in through multiple channels. 

Cross-platform data is notoriously hard to wrangle and access. Because of this, it’s easily left behind or forgotten about completely—meaning that your team misses out on valuable insights that represent the real-time views of the people you’re building for.

With Channels, our voice of customer product, your team can continuously access the needs and values of your audience to guide your decisions in a matter of minutes. Dovetail’s AI continuously analyzes incoming data and classifies it, allowing you to track themes in large data sets in one central, easy-to-access hub. Streamline your work processes and keep up with changes in customer patterns by using Channels to filter through data across multiple sources, including support tickets, app reviews, interviews, NPS scores, and more.

Fully refinable based on your unique needs, you still have control over segmentation and filtering so you can hone in on insights that matter to you most. It’s the best way to get high-quality research insights, at the speed of AI (which, let’s be honest, is a dream when you’re working with a tight deadline.)

Providing teams with instant, cross-platform insights

To get the most out of your research efforts, your entire team needs to be able to access the insights you collect. Traditionally, communicating changes in user behavior or needs clearly has been a challenge—which is why we created Ask Dovetail, a tool that uses our magic search experience to better communicate customer insights.

Magic search is a semantic search engine that uses AI to help teams search by meaning, rather than keywords. Helping to answer questions and connect you to specific insights, this tool is a powerful resource for accessing the data you need to answer pressing customer questions, fast.

Integrated directly with Slack and Microsoft Teams, Ask Dovetail uses magic search to summarize and share relevant insights directly in your communication channels. Simply ask the question and get a response in seconds—ensuring that your entire team stays connected and aligned to the things that are most important to your customers.