Empathy means taking care of users
Empathy is a huge part of the design process. Why? You cannot just look at analytics or big data in isolation. It’s thin data, it lacks human context it lacks cultural meaning, more importantly it can only look at what has happened in the past. It cannot predict unknowns, only provide incremental predictions. Big data cannot find unexplored and unknown areas of opportunity.
So where does this empathy come in? Well what does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to live in this complex world? Empathy is the result of truly understanding users at a deep level. Beyond the basic demographic information, beyond their habits and more into their emotions, their desires, their thoughts, the way they think about the world, the way they think about the product and related ideas.
We design and build experiences with a ton of assumptions about users that we sometimes take for granted. We assume people want to look for things by category, when maybe they just want to be shown the right content without doing anything. We assume that search has taken over, and that users like to search. We assume that users enjoy using our interface, and love the results. We forget what matters most in people’s lives: happiness, each other, love, compassion, belonging, mastery.
It is very dangerous to continue to design experiences without validating the assumptions and without considering the human condition and other factors in users’ environment. Users are inundated with needy apps and companies all begging for their attention, when in reality they just want to live, not manage a bunch of apps. So having empathy for them. Saying, perhaps we can offer users our main value prop without taking more of their time and attention. What can be done?
It’s scary, for companies to say, we want less engagement. But don’t we all want more time to focus on what matters on us? Can’t we all agree that it’s more important to take care of our friends, ourselves and our loved ones rather than take care of an app? The apps should take care of users, and that takes empathy.
