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Empathy is an important skill in all sorts of situations: teaching, managing, collaborating, surviving family dinners, bringing about world peace — you know, typical life things. It’s also an essential skill for design and product development.
Empathy allows us to understand perspectives and feelings that are different from our own and gives us the motivation to act, which leads to outcomes that are empowering and compassionate. For a better look at empathy in design, check out the Interaction Design Foundation’s Getting Started with Empathy.
If empathy isn’t your strong suit or you want to make sure you’re incorporating it into your process — here’s 5 techniques to get you started. The first three are more foundational and the last two focus on implementation in product design.
It may seem counterintuitive but understanding your own emotions & behaviors can actually improve your understanding of others. This awareness plays a role in identifying differences between yourself and others which means that you’re more likely to recognize that people don’t always value what you value. When Nathaniel Eckland researched empathy in over 700 college students, he and his colleagues found that:
Increasing self-awareness takes intentionality but it’s easy to get started. Begin with setting aside some quiet time every day to reflect (even 5 minutes is enough to see benefits). Dedicated quiet time allows your mind to reset and notice underlying emotions that might affect your work, relationships, and mental clarity. For more tips about becoming self-aware, check out Psychology Today’s advice on developing self-awareness.
How many times have you found yourself involved in a conversation with someone but your brain is thinking about what to say next, or maybe the pizza you’re going to have for dinner, or about how the thing they just said reminds you of that time when…
We’ve all been there! Having your mind wander during conversation is natural but it’s not actually listening. Active listening means being present with the speaker and providing them with a safe, open space to talk. It means avoiding the temptation to redirect the conversation’s focus to you. Here’s a couple of tips to hone your active listening skills (this is a manager specific resource ):
Perspective-taking focuses on the ability to understand someone else’s experience without necessarily feeling their feelings. Michael Chanover suggests practicing with someone you see during your day but don’t know much about it. Maybe you think about how early the cashier at Dunkin Donuts woke up to get there in time. Are they providing for a family on their hourly wage? Maybe working their way through college? Do they even like donuts?
Please note that you should never base design or product decisions based solely on imagining someone else’s experience. No matter how good your imagination skills are, you cannot actually know what it’s like in someone else’s shoes.
User research allows your team to see things from other’s perspectives. Take this study of engineering students that shows when a group of engineering students interact more frequently with the people they are designing for, their designs begin to reflect the complexity of the community’s needs, leading to better outcomes. Nielsen Norman reminds us that “the true goal of design is not to be nice to users, but to empower them”, and this can only be achieved by better understanding their needs in the context of use.
User research encompasses several activities but always involves interacting with your target audience. Here are four methods that will help you understand your users — and remember to use active listening techniques!
User interviews — this method works best at the beginning of a project or sprint when you are trying to understand more about customer needs and their environment. Use open ended questions and encourage the interviewee to elaborate on their thinking. It’s usually helpful to start the conversation more broadly and then work your way into specifics.
To exercise active listening, we typically record sessions or have two people on the call so that the interviewer can focus on what the person is saying without worrying about note-taking. In both roles, it’s important to keep your personal thoughts out of the way. We take meticulous notes and avoid excessive summarizing or short hand so we keep a fuller picture of what someone is saying.
Contextual inquiries — this method is also great at the beginning of a project because it gives you a fuller picture of how and when someone might use your product. It also reveals major constraints that could ultimately prevent someone from adopting your solution that you may not know about.
Set aside time to meet people where they are and observe them in their daily routines (what you decide to observe and for how long will ultimately depend on the project goals). As they go about their day record moments when they experience frustrations or delight and if you’re not sure about something, when the timing is appropriate, ask them questions. Remember to withhold judgement as you observe and keep an open mind. When people complete tasks in a way that doesn’t make sense to you there’s generally a good explanation.
Diary studies — this is a great method to understand people’s patterns and behaviors over time. You can use it at the beginning of projects to understand context of use or as a way to chart how people use a new product or feature. They generally require more effort from study participants so you need to think about incentives before recruiting people.
Provide participants with a journaling medium (can be analogue or digital) and give them guidelines about what type of feedback you’re looking for. In other words, how often should they record their thoughts and when should they do it (after using your product, before using it, both, etc.). To ensure you understand their ideas fully, make sure to arrange a time to reach back out to them.
Prototyping — there are several phases and types of prototypes that you can incorporate into your design sprint depending on what phase of the project you are in, but generally it’s used in the middle of the sprint to test initial ideas or toward the end with high fidelity prototypes before launching. Prototyping should always be a mechanism for learning, not just a way to determine success. To maximize your learning in the earlier phases we recommend conducted facilitated sessions with low or medium fidelity prototypes. This gives you an opportunity to hear more about expectations they had for the product, their assumptions about its functionality, and their general impressions about its aesthetics. It also gives you an insight into your customer’s mental model and how the product might be used in their daily lives.
Journey mapping should be used at the beginning of a project or before a new feature is launched. Journey maps are visual aids that show how someone will complete a task or use your product step by step. They also identify potential frustrations and delights someone might encounter during the process. Collaborating with stakeholders on the map is a good way to get buy-in, determine the scope of the project and prioritize efforts. A detailed look at how to create a robust journey map can be found here. Happy mapping!
No matter your timeline or budget, there is always room to improve your self-awareness, actively listen to others, and imagine a scenario from someone else’s perspective. And if you can’t dive fully into someone else’s environment, chances are you can find people willing to talk to you about their experiences. Sometimes user research requires a bit of extra creativity and research — but it’s always worth it. One of my favorite examples of empathy in action comes from the empathy design masters at IDEO. They worked with the Nature Conservancy to help find and rescue entangled whales. Designers couldn’t speak to their main users — the whales — so they spent many hours in kayaks, studied whale movements with marine biologists, and tested different prototypes in swimming pools. In the end, there are a lot of whales swimming free because of their dedication to empathetic design!
1. Self-Awareness
Steve Handle, Why Self-Awareness Is the First Step Toward Empathy from The Emotion Machine
Know Thyself: How to Develop Self-Awareness from Psychology Today
2. Active Listening
Dianne Schilling, 10 Steps to Effective Listening from Forbes
Use Active Listening to Coach Others from Center for Creative Leadership
3. Perspective Taking
Sarah Gibbons, Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX from Nielsen Norman Group
4. User Research
Veronica Cámara, 6 Tips for Better User Interviews form UX Planet in Medium
Contextual Interviews and How to Handle Them from Interaction Design Foundation
Jeanne Liedtka, Perspective: Linking Design Thinking with Innovation Outcomes through Cognitive Bias Reduction from Product Development & Management Association
UXmatters Prototyping User Experience
5. Journey Mapping
Sarah Gibbons, Journey Mapping 101 from Nielsen Norman Group
Extra
Maggie Zhang, How to Do Design Research When Your User Lives Underwater from IDEO
