Empathy in UX Design
While hard skills like managing Design Systems in Figma or conducting UX Research are crucial in UX Design, it’s important to recognize the relevance of soft skills. As a soft skill, Empathy is not just helpful but essential in creating user-centric designs. It’s the key to understanding and connecting with the needs, desires, and emotions of the users we design for, and it’s what enables us to create designs that truly resonate with our users.
What is Empathy?
Let’s start by defining Empathy. According to Adele Lynn’s definition:
“Empathy is understanding the perspective of others.”
Empathy is about understanding not only from a logical standpoint but also from an emotional side. It’s about understanding someone’s feelings and experiences, not just their thoughts.
There are also other definitions of Empathy; I really like what Brene Brown says: “Empathy is feeling with others.” She states four essential characteristics of Empathy:
- Perspective taking: The ability to understand the perspective of others
- Staying out of judgment: Do not judge if the perspective is correct or incorrect, but focus mainly on understanding
- Recognizing emotion in other people
- Communicating that emotion
When we talk about understanding the emotional side of someone else, these emotions are significantly related to their values and what is important to them. For example, someone expressing anger; the emotion is related to a perceived injustice, and something for them is not working the way it was supposed to work. This “something” might indicate a value for the person we are not seeing.
Empathy in UX
In UX design, there are many places where Empathy plays an important role; I will mention four of them:
- Understanding Users: This is the most obvious one. Most of the time, we are designing for someone else, so it is essential to understand who the users are genuinely. To know the users, it can be beneficial to do user research, user testing, and collect user feedback; whatever technique we choose, we need Empathy to get somewhere since Empathy is at the core of understanding.
- Empathy with colleagues: When working as UX Designers, we often interact with people from different areas (developers, managers, sales, customer success, etc.), and people from other areas can bring different perspectives and different concerns. The more perspectives we can consider, the better our understanding of what we are building. In addition, when we work with other people, it is important to share knowledge and share files in a way that they can understand because if UX is about making things simpler and easier, that should include our internal processes and communication as well; it is not only about the design.
- Connecting with managers: We usually interact with managers more than others at the workplace. Managers share the product vision, goals, and priorities; Empathy helps us align these goals and reflect them on the designs. Besides that, Empathy is also essential for clear communication, receiving and giving feedback, and building a trustful relationship.
- Engaging with stakeholders: Daniel Goleman, in his book “Working with Emotional Intelligence,” includes “Political Awareness” as an essential aspect of Empathy — which is the ability to understand the reality of the organization as a whole, that includes understanding the forces that shape views and actions of clients, customers, or competitors. Empathy helps us understand what is happening and take different points of view that can sometimes be conflicting, describing them objectively and taking some personal emotional distance.
In all those situations, learning how to speak someone else’s language is essential, and I am using the word language in a symbolic way. We communicate the designs differently if we are showing them to the manager, developers, some stakeholders, or clients. It is important to question what is essential for them. What do they value most? — If you present to some stakeholders, you will probably focus more on how these new design features can impact the business. If you are speaking to developers, you will focus on the technical side, such as the patterns in the design.
Important Aspects of Empathy
Many essential aspects can help us build Empathy, but I will focus on three:
- Self Awareness
- Active Listening
- Engaging Diversity
Self-awareness
Understanding someone else’s emotions is more complex when we don’t understand our own. Also, we all have our assumptions, beliefs, and values, and it is relevant to know what they are because they impact how we think and feel and manifest in our interactions with others.
Imagine a situation when we feel angry or frustrated; we most likely stop listening to others and connecting because we are focused on our emotions. So what to do with it? We cannot stop the feelings, which is not the goal, but we can recognize, accept, and learn from them. Recognizing feelings is not always easy; we tend to put everything in a big box and call it “stress” or “anxiety,” for example. But the more we practice, the more we realize what we are feeling and why, getting to our values and beliefs.
Active Listening
“Sensing what others feel without their saying so captures the essence of Empathy. Others rarely tell us in words what they feel; instead, they tell us in their tone of voice, facial expression, or other nonverbal ways.”
Daniel Goleman
Active listening is not only about listening to words. It is about observing all the way the other person is communicating nonverbally. Today, in the world of technology, we have a more significant challenge when we may not always talk with people in person. In any case, we should seek that, and when it is not possible, seek a video call; seeing all the other nonverbal emotional expressions in meetings or when doing user interviews is essential. The less we do it, the more we lose this ability to interpret those nonverbal signs, and we lose a lot of components of communication.
Daniel Goleman says that listening is an art, and it requires practice. People who seem easy to talk to are those who get to hear more and get more chances to practice. For this reason, the first step is to be open to listening; being open means allowing people to interrupt, express themselves, and ask questions. An exercise that I have been practicing that helps me be open to listening is to constantly think: What can I learn from people today? Or, what have I learned?
Listening well and deeply means going beyond what is said by asking questions and restating what you hear in your own words to be sure you understand. This is “active” listening. Sometimes, what stops us from asking questions is the fear of looking dumb in front of others; however, without asking, we might never truly learn and understand.
It is also crucial to distinguish listening with Empathy from agreeing with people. Understanding someone’s point of view and how they feel does not mean embracing it. But here is the key: when we truly understand others, we can express ourselves and our opinions better.
Engage Diversity
“There is strength in difference, and this makes the ability to leverage diversity an increasingly crucial competence.”
Daniel Goleman
According to Daniel Goleman, it is harder for us to understand non-verbal signals of emotions in people who belong to groups significantly different from our own. Every group has its norms for expressing emotion; when we are unfamiliar with them, it is harder to emphasize. The problem is that when we close ourselves to people who are different from us and don’t interact with them, we might reinforce certain stereotypes.
Stereotypes can damage an organization and our relationships. When we expect less of someone because we have interpreted their culture or their way of doing things as “less efficient,” we are reinforcing that image in our minds; the other person will feel a lack of motivation because, besides doing their work, they will first have to prove that our stereotype is wrong.
Better than adding labels to others and ourselves is to stay curious and open to learning new aspects from people. We should constantly challenge our assumptions by interacting more with someone different than us, asking questions, observing how they communicate and what is essential for them. This is important for communicating with colleagues and clients and doing user research.
We all have heard the expressions “users would not like that” and “users will understand better this way”. Maybe we used them as well. The question is: is this statement based on my assumptions or the assumptions of someone else? We should challenge that by interacting with real users.
Conclusion
Empathy is a cornerstone of successful UX design, transcending the importance of technical skills by fostering a deeper connection with users, colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. By understanding and feeling with others, designers can create more intuitive, user-centric designs that resonate emotionally. This empathetic approach enhances the user experience and improves communication, collaboration, and trust within teams and organizational structures. Emphasizing self-awareness, active listening, and engaging with diversity, empathy empowers UX designers to break down stereotypes, challenge assumptions, and continuously learn from and adapt to the needs and emotions of those they design for and work with. Empathy transforms the design process into a more inclusive, innovative, and human-centered endeavor.
References
Books:
- The EQ Difference: A Powerful Plan for Putting EQ to Work (Adele Lynn)
- Working with Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)
Podcasts:
Videos: