How to bring empathy in your design?
Being able to feel and think for users is a must-to-have quality in designer
Empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions, and worldview purposefully in order to understand other people's experiences of things deeply and meaningfully.
Empathy in design process
Empathy is an innate quality and that’s probably what best designers in the space have. When you learn about people on an objective level, you can understand what they need for performing their tasks. When you learn about your target group on a subjective level, you can understand what they are aiming for and what they are feeling when they are trying to accomplish it. You need the latter for designing experiences.
If empathy is an innate quality, can only the chosen ones be the best designers? Certainly no. In this post I’ll outline five techniques that you can use to consciously improve your own empathy.
Why bother doing so? Because it will make you a better designer. You’ll have a stronger connection to the users of the system, and this will influence your design decisions.
Travel puts you out of your comfort zone. It makes you see new places and people, hear new sounds, taste new food, and have different experiences. But it does something else. It helps you to identify and understand the situation, feelings and motives of another person. In other words, it helps you to develop empathy. It is a skill that can be hard to develop in everyday life.
Hey, fellow designers! Travel helps in developing empathy (Click to tweet)

Learning about other cultures can help you design for them, too. A classic example is China, where red is the colour of joy. Incidentally, we relate red more with danger.
Wander around in the user’s world to collect qualitative data — and the best way to do it is by talking to them. This helps you take the user’s point of reference. When you start to collect data actively by participating as a member of the food court team, talking to them during coffee breaks and taking pictures of things that stand out to you, you start to experience the context from your users’ point of view.
You could also talk to your user segment on Quora.

Become the user. Spend a day or so every month using the web with an older device, or throttled speeds. Get outside and browse on your phone in a variety of weather conditions. Use your own site or service, where possible and applicable. Put your site out there in the real world and find everything that bugs you about it. Use an older browser.
It was some time ago, but the years I spent on dial-up while the world progressed to broadband internet all around me… that’s never going away. And I honestly believe that it made me a better designer. There’s no real substitute for experiencing the web in a worst case scenario. The times I had to wait half an hour for a Flash object to load made me strong, and they made me count bytes.
Ohhh did I just contradict what I said? Ya I did, but you really need to hear this — Due to today’s rapidly decreasing cost of building a prototype, it has become cheaper to try something than it would be to talk about it.
Alas, we still talk too much (not to our users but to our stakeholders, colleagues and fellow designers).
Famed Google Glass inventor, Tom Chi likes to point out:
“Your objective is to turn conjectures into actuals in the smallest amount of time with the least amount of resources.” [Click to tweet]
And the only way to do this is by rapidly prototyping your idea and putting it in front of customers.
So stop talking. Start building — Try CanvasFlip for FREE

Step back into the role of designer, reflect and create ideas. While it may seem sufficient to get the empathic insights by following the previous steps, you need to look at your subjective data with a designer’s mind so as to translate the empathic insights into ideas.
Watch users using your interface, talk to them about their difficulties and suggestions. Roll out surveys that might be triggered on an event or a predetermined time. There is lots to takeaway from these subjective data. We use CanvasFlip to gather subjective data on prototypes (user videos, surveys, annotations and more). I believe you’d love it too! :)
In order to design great experiences, you need empathic insights. It is important to balance the steps of collecting subjective insights with objective reasoning and analysis. The best way to collect the subjective information is to embed yourself in the context of your target group and gain personal insights into the experiences they have.


