How to Engage in Empathetic Research Practices during Covid
Walking and dancing together with your users
The significance of empathizing with target users was depicted in the late-1990s, when corporate companies learned that surveying customers was not sufficient to gain insights to innovate products and services. Significant insights come from a deep dive into one’s motivations and needs. Subsequently, empathy towards target users is considered as an essential quality in Human-Centered Design (HCD) research to understand what target users truly desire.
However, while the world is on lockdown due to Covid-19, research teams have limited in-person listening opportunities. Nevertheless, the 55 Minutes team is motivated to seek alternative ways of research in order to inspire and inform the ‘define’ and ‘design’ stage in the HCD process — discover, define, design and test.
We highlight three main approaches in the research process, to keep up empathetic research plans and methods during this pandemic:
1) Observing others’ shoes
2) Wearing others’ shoes
3) Walking together
Step 1: Observing others’ shoes
*Shoes are metaphorical terms to indicate the target user’s situations.
✔︎ Why this matters
To observe others’ shoes, you are scoping target users — where their shoes are placed, their type of shoes they wear, and who owns them. From this, we can set up hypotheses on who our target users are, what they need, how they behave, think and feel, and why.
We can observe others’ shoes in many ways, such as observational studies, desktop research, and through news; however, in a pandemic, existing data may not sufficiently inform us about people’s experiences, as life patterns and ways of thinking have changed. Thus, it is important to get updates from real time data on what people are going through from current situations.
✔︎ Tips for observing others’ shoes during Covid🤞
One effective way to gain real-time information and stories is through social media/networks research.
- Understanding overall sentiments from social media: Due to social media’s open access to content and opinions, searching your topic’s key words will help you make sense of general sentiments on your topic. For example, you can look at how many “likes” and “dislikes,” and understand your users by quickly scanning social media comments.
- Dig into a specific story: Think about specific online forums and community groups where your target users gather. For example, parents might gather on online parent forums to express their thoughts and share their current experiences.
- Observe their context: Watching YouTube videos regarding your topics allows you to observe visually your target users’ context — what circumstances target users reside in, how they express their circumstances.
- Read reviews and comments: Virtual spaces provide anonymity for commenters, so such anonymous comments on YouTube can reflect your target group’s honest thoughts and comments in a way that might not occur from typical conversations.
- Summarize the data: With the information collected, find patterns that appear across the data by grouping similar findings and categorizing them. You can make sense of these patterns through visual forms like a chart, or a table, or graphical representations.
✔︎ Examples
- Sense overall sentiments — use platforms such as “Social Searcher — for quick trend search to identify which media channel your target users gather at and which media posts are ranked high in the channel.
- Dig into specific stories — Example of a forum article that contains a real story about concerns of parents of teenagers in Singapore
Summarize the data — Example of how data can be visualized after research on caregivers’ challenges for elderly people
Step 2: Wearing others’ shoes
The second step of gaining empathetic insights of target users, is wearing others’ shoes, such as through bodystorming.
The term “bodystorming” was introduced in the early 90’s to identify what was working and what wasn’t at the early stage of the product development process. Bodystorming simulates the roles of users by testing out a product in a similar situation that your users may be in. While bodystorming seems similar to role play study which also requires you to play the role of target users in a simulated situation, low-fidelity mockups or props (products that you are targeted to design) are a key requirement in bodystorming.
✔︎ Why this matters
When researchers and designers encounter challenges doing mock-up testing during Covid, they can consider conducting bodystorming. This helps your team fuel empathy by letting you act, feel, and think like your users without meeting them in person. In addition, it helps the design team continue to gain insights on possible problems and issues that could occur from the designs.
✔︎ Tips for panning bodystorming during Covid🤞
Accounting for the data you gathered in the step of observing others’ shoes, you can facilitate this activity remotely with your team:
- Plan guidelines that help your team have a clear idea on how to perform the activity in their own place:
- Define roles of users based on your preliminary research data: Who are they? Are they elderly people? What kind of characteristics do they have?
- Set limitations to replicate the role: Do your users have specific physical limitations? How will you help bodystormers to act out the limitations?
- Write scenarios for what to perform: What do they need to accomplish? And in which context would your target users use your product and services: (E.g. When this happens? Where are they at?)
- Reflection guide template: What do you want to measure from the test?
- Video recording guide: Ensure the right angles of video cameras to capture their acting of users’ roles
2. Perform bodystorming remotely: Set deadlines. Collect videos and reflection guides from bodystormers.
3. Mapping out the findings (e.g. empathy map): Gather your team to share their experiences of the users’ role and integrate the shared understanding via mapping tools such as empathy map.
✔︎ Examples — to act, feel, think like your users
The 55 Minutes team conducted a bodystorming to understand “how the elderly people who are limited in their movements would act, feel and think when they get dressed from their caregivers.”
- Set limitations to replicate users’ roles: The knees of the bodystormer who act out the role of elderly care receivers, are wrapped by cardboards and tapes in order to simulate limitations caused by knee pains in the scenario of getting dressed/undressed.
- Mapping out the findings: An empathy map is a great tool to synthesize bodystorming experiences by summarizing what bodystormers do, think, feel, see, hear, and say.
Step 3: Walking together
✔︎ Why this matters — walking and dancing together with your users
After researching people’s unique situations and challenges, researchers need to walk and dance alongside their targeted audience with their empathetic hearts. When listening to users, we are open, waiting to hear unexpected insights by setting aside assumptions and hypotheses.
During Covid, we can speak and listen to people through video calls; these calls still allow us to build empathetic interview practices, where we walk together with participants. Below are tips on how to mindfully plan remote interviews.
✔︎ Tips for remote interviews🤞
- Before the call:
- Check your participants’ familiarity with the video call settings. Before having the video call, send them instructions and guidance on how to check technical aspects of audio and video settings.
- Create rapport with participants before having a video call for them to feel welcome and to remind/ motivate them to participate. Otherwise, there might be cases where your participant is not present on the day of the interview.
2. During the call:
- Before starting, ensure participants’ audio and video are working well
- Look at your computer camera as much as you can and respond with non-verbal cues such as nodding. This will help participants feel assured that they are being listened to.
- Observe any non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language that might help you understand what they really mean
- If having a notetaker, their audio should be muted while taking notes to reduce unexpected noise. Video can be on to show their presence.
- Build rapport throughout the interview by asking their current feelings and being conversational, as when participants feel comfortable, their insights will be more easily projected in the conversation.
- Although you may have a prepared script, listen carefully, and don’t be afraid to probe further on the spot.
- End the conversation by expressing appreciation and remind participants how their insights will contribute to the project
3. After the call:
- Debrief and share key takeaways between those involved in the video calls to digest and summarize the main findings
- Scan through the interview notes and identify what is surprising and unexpected, compared to the pre-defined assumptions and hypotheses that were researched in the previous steps
In conclusion:
Despite the fact that HCD research methods are limited in times of crisis, we can still gain invaluable insights that are necessary to innovate and develop our products and services. Sacrificing understanding and empathy towards users in a time of crisis never has been an option; it is arguably even more important to stand firm our position to understand our target users. These times have inspired the 55 Minutes team to move forward to the ideation stage to target the right problems to solve, propelling us into finding innovative and creative solutions.
Hye Yoon is a UX researcher at 55 Minutes. She has a Bachelor’s in furniture and spatial design from Seoul, South Korea, and has a Master’s in design research from Helsinki, Finland. She loves nature and goes cycling every weekend in the Northeast region of Singapore.
