Empathy. What is it good for?
In a recent episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain, the host asks Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, an expert on empathy, if he thinks that technology has made society less empathetic. This question made me consider the role designers play in creating more empathy through the products we create.
It’s no secret that the word empathy gets used a lot in the design industry. Empathy is a way for designers to understand users so that we can design products that produce better outcomes.
However, we rarely consider if the products we build enable users to have empathy for one another.
Digital products have done tremendous things for society. They allow us to do things like connect with old friends halfway around the world, pay bills from our mobile phones, and give us a platform to reach thousands of people in an instant.
However, because technology is so great augmenting our abilities, it has created barriers that filter human interactions through interfaces and services. This means the decisions we make as product designers often affect the manner in which people treat communication, and each other.
In the book The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World, the author mentions how Snapchat’s “streak” feature, which encourages users to keep messages going back-and-forth, prioritizes quantity over quality. She says this contributes to what is called “conversation gamification”. This is where users focus on things like being the first to comment, or gathering as many likes as possible. These types of features, under the guise of entertainment, ultimately devalue communication and deteriorate our social skills for the sake of engagement.
So how do we ensure that the products we design facilitate higher-quality human interactions? I think we start by asking ourselves if the features we build foster healthy habits which improve the quality of communication. If we only focus on user engagement we run the risk of driving a wedge even further between people in an already divided world.
