An Introduction to Empathetic Design
By Mikal Mahoney
What is Empathetic Design?
Empathetic Design is a user designed approach that focuses on the feelings of the users towards a product. It’s also the first step of the Design Thinking Process. Without it, many products wouldn’t meet the needs and expectations of the user so it’s always best to empathize with the users and listen to their needs.
Empathy vs. Sympathy
Empathy is understanding a person’s feelings, trying to be aware of their emotions, and sharing them as well. It’s a great way to link yourself with another person and put yourself in their shoes. With that out of the way, let’s talk about sympathy, which is often mistaken with empathy. While sympathy is understanding someone else’s situation, empathy is feeling what someone else is going through. For example, if you are consoling a friend who has experienced loss, sympathy is understanding their grief, while empathy is feeling their grief. It’s more impactful to feel with them rather than give them pity.
Now, how does this apply to design? Designers need to understand and feel the needs of users so that they can create meaningful solutions for them.
Why is it important from a marketing/business standpoint?
Empathetic Design is different from your standard traditional market research because designers focus on the user’s needs to create apps or products that they didn’t even know they want. You also want to communicate your brand to your audience, to let them know that your product is desirable, useful, and even useable by the means of its visual identity. How it relates to branding is that you’re targeting a specific audience and putting yourself into their shoes. You are envisioning the world from their point of view and what problems they struggle with. You are connecting with the users on an emotional level, which some companies have missed their mark on.
Why is user input important?
There’s more to just designing a product to look good, it’s more about satisfying the needs of the consumers and taking it as feedback to improve the product’s performance. This can be applied in many different ways, such as structured interviews (things like surveys and questionnaires), semi-structured interviews, and unstructured or deep interviews. Unstructured interviews are important for empathetic design since you can take notes from the voices of the users and create new goals from them.
Good and Bad Examples of Empathetic Design
When designing with empathy, you want to consider what are good examples of Empathetic Design? For example, ease of access plays a huge part. While slapping a navbar on the bottom of the page is great, Empathetic Design requires us to dig deeper. YouTube has an easily accessible upload button, that allows users to efficiently import their content without having to go through multiple clicks and different pages. Accessibility is a crucial part of empathetic design. For example, empathy has allowed for meaningful features like text-to-speech for the visually impaired, and designs that are safe for users to prevent seizures.
One app that has a good empathetic design is Spotify, which is a digital app that does music, podcasts, and more. Spotify is accessible for creators from all over the world, which gives their users a sense of being heard and understood.
Another way Spotify makes users feel understood is the way it integrates with Facebook. You can easily view the musical preferences of friends and followers, which helps you form connections through similar tastes. In addition, Spotify provides recommendations to songs and playlists, which helps you hear familiar favorites, as well as discover new songs and genres. Lastly, it gives a feeling of being heard with the developers being open ears about the needs of their users be it troubleshooting, problems with passwords, and more I know that they have my back 95% of the time.
While there are other well-designed apps/products there are also bad ones as well. One huge example is Google Glass, Google Glass was released to the public in 2014.
It functioned as a hands-free smartphone with voice commands, a superior camera, and strong processing power. That sounds pretty cool, right? While that is true, many questions began surrounding it like, “Will this product be comfortable to wear for long periods of time?” and “Will I be able to afford it?”. After its release, the product didn’t have a very good reception to the public, especially because the price of $1500 was not affordable to the average Joe. The action commands didn’t perform well either, which limited access between the haves and the have-nots. Next, people found other ways to spend their money on other luxury items because it doesn’t look nice, despite Google’s efforts to work with fashion designers. Google Glass failed as a product because it lacked clarity on why it existed and didn’t give any solutions to how the users would use them.
How does it work with Accessibility?
Accessibility plays a big part in the empathetic design process, you can listen to the needs of your users and what they would want to improve their experience with your product/app. Designing with accessibility allows people to understand and perceive how they interact with the world online. A misconception is that accessibility requires a focus on users that have some kind of disability, but it isn’t true. Accessibility means that it should be available to everyone, increasing the ease of use for all ability levels. Inclusive design goes hand and hand with accessibility because it’s not always about visible disabilities. The invisible disabilities matter as well and their needs and voices want to be heard as well. This can range from not having the dynamic background to reducing distractions, using sober text, and using color contrasts.
Conclusion
To sum up, Empathetic Design is a user-designed approach that focuses on the feelings of the users towards a product. It focuses on putting themselves into the shoes of their users and how they see the world from their point of view.
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