From Empathy to Compassion: An Evolution in UX
We hear it all the time — we need to empathize with our users. The d.school, IDEO, and anyone who reads an article about design thinking recognizes it as a crucial step to successful and innovative design. But I’m here to say that we as researchers and designers are still falling short when we stop at empathy. UX and design thinking is evolving, and so should our constructs for discussing the process. Now more than ever, we need not just empathy, but compassion.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that empathy is not an important part of what we do. But as we have become more sophisticated in our understanding of human-centered research and design, we need to consider what empathy means, go back to psychology, and check in to see how our constructs hold up based on how we, as humans, operate.
1. What is empathy?
Empathy is a cornerstone of UX. Without understanding the context and experience of our users, how will we begin to design a solution that fits their needs and pain points? Empathy requires us to be open to taking on the emotions, thoughts, and experience of someone else. It doesn’t guarantee anything will change, we just hope by asking ourselves to experience what the user is experiencing, it will compel us to change the user’s experience to make it better.
2. Why is empathy lacking, and why do we need compassion?
Empathy is feeling with. Compassion is feeling with, with the end goal of ending the suffering for that person. Compassion requires us to be open to taking on the emotions, thoughts, and experience of someone else, with the intent of improving that person’s experience. It’s a key difference: without the intent there, it’s easy to brush aside the experiences. Feeling what someone else feels doesn’t guarantee that we will put in effort to change the person’s situation. With the intent there to improve a user’s experience, from the outset we’re more open to an end goal of change.
3. Okay, great, so I’m convinced. How do I move my process more toward compassion?
Have compassion for the user
Often with empathy, I see the following process: UX professional does formative research (interviews, surveys, etc.) and asks user what their pain points are. User reports pain point. UX professional reports back to the team, and team addresses pain points, but struggles to create innovative solutions, or user still has pain points when usability testing concepts. This happens for a few reasons: Users don’t always recognize when they’re suffering. (Seriously, watch a user go through a task, and designers will recognize problems, but they may not always see them.) So self-reporting techniques can be unreliable in identifying pain points.
Some UX methods are better at letting researchers and designers be compassionate than others. For example, surveys versus contextual inquiries. While surveys do let us get a glimpse inside what a user is experiencing, I, as the researcher, cannot experience first hand what the user is experiencing. Contextual inquiries on the other hand let me be next to the user, observing, listening, and actively asking question to align myself with the user as much as I possibly can. (Of course contextual inquiries are tough, but there are ways of conducting remote contextual inquiries, and I’m planning on writing about that soon.)
Have compassion for the team and stakeholders
It’s easy to write off other UX team members or internal stakeholders when they don’t get to experience first-hand what the user experienced. But speaking to them with an open mindset, and understanding how they are experiencing data is critical to then communicating effectively the insights and opportunities from research.
Stakeholders also provide integral insights to understand the business side of the user experience. It’s okay to have compassion for them, too. Often it’s easy to write off the business goals of a project saying, “Well, I’m only here to create a great UX. I don’t understand the business side of things.” No — go out and understand the business side of things, because it’ll make us better designers. It’s more constraints for us to play with, and ultimately, can build rapport with stakeholders so that they’re more willing to engage with new (and often to them, scary-looking) design ideas. That doesn’t mean we have to discredit or not advocate for the user. By being compassionate to stakeholders, we prove ourselves to be willing to listen to their side of the problem space.
Communicate compassion instead of empathy
Any UX researcher or designer has been there: we walk into a room with a Keynote presentation full of research insights. Or maybe we’re joining a conference call and only have 20 minutes to present research findings, and even though we speak with passion and advocate for the users’ experiences, the data aren’t received in the way we hoped. Others don’t connect with it as deeply as we do. This is why I turn to activities and workshops instead of Keynote presentations. Workshops, even brief, allow the participants to engage with us, and in turn, the user. We’d never expect the user to create a PowerPoint presentation of their goals, behaviors, and insights, so why should we do the same when those who are receiving the information need to make decisions and create innovative solutions?
UX design is set up for compassion. Our process calls on us to consider and experience different perspectives in order to transform suffering into better experiences.
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