Using emphatic design thinking as a competitive advantage
Talking about empathy in the context of human relationships isn’t a new thing, but including that in the agenda of the business world is. Or at least it was until very recently, when companies discovered empathy as a differential to address their stakeholders — internally and beyond.
Empathy anyway, what is it?
We can define empathy as the ability to put yourself in the other’s shoes. However, this can lead us to a very superficial view of this ability.
Perhaps the best way to define empathy is to put yourself “in the shoes” of the other, but think and feel how he feels. For example: imagine yourself with someone else’s problem, but do it imagining yourself as being them, and not you in their situation, can you understand? It’s thinking about someone else’s situation in their context, their age, their physique, and their dilemmas rather than your own. From that perspective, a lot of changes…
The empathetic lens in product design
From an empathetic view of an audience, it is much easier to understand their needs, difficulties, and objectives, and thus much more accurate targeting in developing a product or service.
In the book “Empathy” from the Emotional Intelligence Collection published by Harvard Business Review, Jon Kolko describes in his article “A process for empathic product design” the long path taken in the development of a tool aimed at university students, to help them in the post-university phase, MyEdu Profile.
In this product development process, after extensive observation of university students and corporate recruiters, he and the team were collecting insights that, according to him, “act as the input information in this phase of the empathetic design process, and the result of this process is a promise of value with an emotional charge”. And that promise is the “lens” through which the company sees the world from the perspective of its target audience.
The secret is to focus on people
I think it’s already clear that empathy is not only a quality that helps in interpersonal relationships, but it can be a powerful tool for companies to stand out in the market by creating more efficient products and services.
Finally, I quote Jon Kolko again, as he clearly defined the difference in the success of a product that chooses an empathetic path for its creation: “it is a process informed by deep qualitative data, instead of statistical market data. It celebrates people over technology.”
After all, nothing better than knowing people well to know what makes them happy.
