Read Part 1 about what it means to have empathy working on a virtual team…

Writers are master storytellers and understand how to share information to a virtual audience

Writers create art that isn't experienced live at creation. They express an idea in words for someone to read not only at a different time, but a different place and for a wide audience. Writers try to be sure they are communicating clearly. Some will have others read their work to make sure it makes sense. They target writing for a specific audience knowing that just about anyone will read the piece, so in some ways, there is a balance of creating something for someone who needs to read it versus who does happen to come across it and read it.

Writers will often structure a piece to share a story in a linear step by step sequence. Or share a story in a more circular way. Either way, the goal of any piece is to get someone to picture a scene, process, future vision – anything idea, concept or scene – in his or her mind. A writer creates an experience for the imagination. It's a type of experience that doesn't happen in person, but it is highly personal and individual.

Ironically, the defined experience on the page is broad enough to accommodate many; specific enough for a reader to create his own experience in his head.

The takeaway:

As a UX or CX professional, consider how writers tell a story to someone who they don't know, who can't ask additional questions, and doesn't care about some details (but know that there are details that are necessary to tell the story properly)?

And you need to tell a story that your target audience will understand – as will people who happen to stumble upon your piece.

That's the type of framework any online experience should take. Try to do the same with an experience you construct.

Working Remotely helps you Listen better. Listening is key to empathy.

Listening is awesome. It is hard to do, but it is something I enjoy doing. It helps me learn more about other people, their motivations, their interests, what makes them work. I think it is a core skill that's needed in the world. If more people listened to each other, fewer virtual teams would fail and more people would work well together.  

Justin Treasure talks about listening often. He's one of my heroes because he is so spot on about it. Here's a diagram I stole from one of his lectures about what we learn in school. Listening is often on not on the list.

So how does one listen? There are two guidelines I follow: 

1. Listen to understand, not respond.
2. Consider listening a prime time activity. It is not something you can multi-task and do in the background, like listening to the radio.
3. Listening is key to a conversation. Conversations are about give and take. If you keep talking, you keep giving. You have to take sometimes too.

How many of us have been caught in that trap?  You are on a call, you discuss something, and then you find out that the other person isn't listening – says something and later on you act like no one ever talked about it.

Or you listen with judgement in your mind about what is being discussed, subconsciously allowing yourself to hear what you want to hear from that person. You may miss what the person was trying to share with you. And you may miss an opportunity to interact with that person.

Listening, if done well, gives you insight into other people's perspectives and empathy for others. You can hear the tone of someone's voice. You can hear if someone is distracted. What someone is talking about tells you what is on his or her mind. You hear what is being said as well as what is NOT being said.

You take what someone allowed you to know and get as much meaning out of it as you can. Listening is what really builds relationships. It is not the talking or sharing. It is understanding all of the possible motivations for someone, all of the possibilities where he or she could be coming from.

Listening allows someone to share their perspective with you, build trust, and build a relationship. 

This is a skillset vital for UX and CX professionals. 

• Usability testing requires listening skills. You need to read between the lines of what is discussed and shared and what isn't. Sometimes it is what the user isn't seeing that is the gap for massive product improvements.

• Ask questions about what isn't being said. Knowing what isn't being said only happens when you are listening to the other person.

• Listen without judgements. You may want to confirm a particular result from a usability review or test, but if that expected and desired outcome isn't occurring, you need the objectivity to realize that maybe a different solution is necessary. Take what they say at face value.

• If you can't listen to real people – use data. Read between the lines to determine what the data tells you – and what it doesn't tell you. Listening to people closely teaches you how to read between the lines, and it is a skillset that helps you in so many other areas. Especially when analyzing data. – and I think this is key for most UX/CX professionals to be able to do.

• Stop talking all the time, listen, and have a conversation. Most content is about talking, or giving – it's going on and on about a topic. Stop. Start a dialogue or discussion. Conversations and the experience of a conversation are what drive relationships. And an interaction online is a conversation.

So how do you use all of this information?

How can you use the experience of working with a virtual team, listening and understanding how writers work? 

• When creating an experience, help your audience visualize what you are trying to accomplish. When you work with a virtual team and you need to explain an idea, you tell a story and try to help the team envision a process or an idea. An experience should be like a story.

• Build a relationship with your audience by sharing a story – or rather, an experience. You don't know them, and probably never will. But a story, or rather experience, will help them understand you better. 

• Make sure your experience is specific enough for users to have an individualized experience, but general enough for many people to want to have that experience. Be like a writer – target one group but make sure that others can experience it too.

• Use your data as a "listening" tool to learn more about your audience and how to best work with them. Know that it is ok not to fully understand all of the motivations for them.

• Know that not everyone will share all of their insights and perspectives with you – so listen to what's being said and not said. Sometimes, what's not being said is more important.

• This wasn't really covered much, but people don't read. This is a large part of my presentation on virtual teams – and it drives my advice to create more audio, video and other types of content. Stop with the ebooks and Web pages already! People are knowledge collectors. If someone wants more information, they will let you know and have a conversation.

• Stop talking and start having a conversation. Conversations are the best experiences because they are about sharing. And that's key to knowing what it means to listen and be on a virtual team. Give and take. Make sure your site has more of those experiences – it keeps people engaged.

If it is possible, I think UX and CX professionals should work virtually so that they can understand what it means to be a user. It is hard to be isolated, only interacting with a company through a Web site or phone. This is why it is so important to learn how to listen and how to have a conversation. Examine how writers achieve story telling and how they pull people into experiences. And remember – people share what they want to share. You don't know the full story. You need to listen carefully to get that. 

I have been working with virtual teams for about 20 years. There have been variable levels of virtual-ness to them. In some cases, I worked with colleagues in Europe or Asia actively on a project. In other cases, people were working on the same project in different cities. In yet other cases, we were all individual contributors working from our desks at home. 

There were timezone differences, location differences, cultural differences.

In all cases, I would be working with people I saw once a year, if that. I mostly interacted with people on the phone, chat/instant message, or email. 

I have given a presentation a number of times now about how to work with virtual teams as a UX professional using Agile methodologies. I never directly saw the connection between understanding what it means to work virtually and how that applies to user experience and customer experience. But there is a connection. And that connection is probably why I keep working on virtual projects.

What you get out of working virtually when you are a UX/CX professional.

Or – working virtually teaches you empathy when you don't know the full story.

When you work virtually, you don't get to see what the person at the next desk is working on today. You have no idea what's truly happening in an office – literally and figuratively. If there are rumors brewing and secret discussions happening, you simply don't know about them. You only know what you see and experience, which isn't much, especially if you work from home or in a different office. You are removed from the team and the in-office experience.

It is hard to ask someone questions and interact directly because you aren't sure what their focus is for the day or what they need to do. There are many unknowns about a virtual team member's life.

You only see what people allow you to see. 

You don't know the emotional state of your colleagues, unless they tell you. For all you know, that person acting cold and aloof on the phone could be having a rough day and trying to keep it to him or herself. You can't see if that person is in distress, happy, nervous, sad, or any other emotion. People share what they want to share with you on the phone, on chat, or in email. People don't always share good or bad news, for whatever reason. And you will never know the motivation to share or not share and it shouldn't matter. 

Yes – I said it. Motivations don't matter.

In the end, you need to connect with that person, regardless of his or her feelings and emotions, and get work done. You need to operate with compassion, knowing that someone may be hiding – intentionally or unintentionally – his or her feelings about a topic. And those hidden feelings hide that individual's true motivations. When you work remotely, you need to be able to consider multiple motivations for someone's actions because you simply don't know what is driving them. 

And again – you aren't there to know. Your job is to listen to that person and try to understand what he or she is experiencing at that moment.

Although this makes building relationships online difficult, understanding people, their emotions, and motivations from afar is a skillset that is amazingly useful for UX and CX professionals to have.

We create experiences for people who aren't in front of us to ask us questions. We don't always know what users are feeling during an experience. We don't know everyone's motivation for going to a site or app to complete a task. We like to think we know how they are responding to content or design during an experience, but we don't. Sure, personas and ethnographic research informs us, but we honestly don't know the motivations for each individual. UX and CX professionals only understand experiences through clicks or the scroll of a screen, call records, or other data. We know people through stats. In a usability study, we can ask questions, but we are only hearing what these participants tell us, only seeing the facial expressions they are sharing, only seeing what they are clicking.

Like the virtual world, we need to keep in mind that we are getting information that a user is allowing us to see. Or information that we are able to gather. We don't always have the full picture.

Most times, users won't share what their challenges are with a site or product. We will need to explore the issue with more people to get a better understanding. Most times, users will go to a site and do what they need to do. Some users "make do" with an experience. Some complain and send emails or messages. But most just try to make a solution work.

What does it mean to communicate to someone who is pretty much anonymous?

How do we make an experience as easy as possible for someone who is right in front of you, but you don't know? And all we know about this person is how he or she is providing feedback about an experience through clicks.

It is similar to working with a virtual team. You probably don't know much about that person except what his or her job is. But you need to find a way to work with that person and get something done.

This is why I think it's key for UX and CX people to work remotely. It helps you realize:

• What it means to know someone but not know them – and to know that it doesn't always matter. We have personas and research. We understand a handful of possible motivations they may have to complete tasks, but we don't know the details of their life. Nor should we. Nor do we need to. You can still build a great relationship with someone without that information. You need to have a working relationship with the user and need to define what that means.

• What it means NOT to be part of a live and in-person experience. Users experience completing a task through what's on the screen. They don't know or understand what happens inside a company – nor should they. It's almost like working remotely. You know what happens at the company based on what you are exposed to through the phone, Web sites, emails…not what you are missing or you simply don't know.

• What it means to interact with ONLY a screen and have no other way to know who you are dealing with. That's how most customers interact with you – a screen. Or through articles that they read. Or through a phone call. Or through a chat window. These customers have a limited view into a company and that is ok. It's not necessary and it can still be successful.

• What it means to have a working relationship with someone. What do you need to know about someone to get your job done – and vice versa? Frankly, not much. You need to know some basics about the person, but knowing someone personally is a great feature. It's not necessary. When you design for people, you don't need to know the details – and these users probably won't tell you anyway in their actions with through data or other means.

Some things to keep in mind when you design knowing the virtual team experience:

• What knowledge do you as a designer or developer take for granted about the user?
• What are all of the possible motivations of someone coming to your site or app? 
• What would you like someone to be feeling when they use your product or visit your site? 
• What do you take for granted that a user may know about the process your company puts online?
• What do you think the users assume about your business? Are there myths to correct?
• How are new features or products communicated to users?
• What is really industry jargon vs. a word to use? Does your audience use jargon? Do you care if people outside your target don't understand what you are saying?
• What does it mean to be an outsider (new customer, prospect, outside the industry)? How can this outsider be welcomed into the fold? 

What can writers teach UX/CX professionals and listening in Part 2. Stay tuned!