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When you can't talk to customers: using storyboards and narratives to elicit empathy for users

Although an essential part of customer-centered design is the customers themselves, in some circumstances, talking with them is not always an option. What can designers do in such situations to better understand peoples' physical, cognitive, and emotional needs? In this paper, we discuss our attempts to elicit customers' needs and emotions without talking with them. We discuss how we: 1) used customer surrogates (in the form of direct-experience storyboarding, personas and narratives) to understand customers' frustrating and pleasurable experiences with a national, public library; 2) communicated the customer experience to stakeholders and helped them empathize with customers; and 3) relied on the personas and narratives to develop design recommendations.