Empathy in design thinking
I think times are tough for designers — timelines, family, finances, clients, you name them. We find ourselves being pushed to the wall making us forget the most important stakeholder in what we do — the user.
I have seen people using technology to build amazing applications and innovations. What kills me is the fact that they end up trying to find people to use their innovations and applications.
Being a big fan of user centered design; I would say that think users first. If only the people I mentioned above would take their time to understand who they are building for, then they would not have to go and find people to use their products as they would have already solved an actual existing user problem.
In user-centric design, empathy is a centerpiece. The moment you put efforts trying to know your users and caring for their lives, you will end up creating meaningful innovations and designs.
So empathy,
Empathy is the experience of understanding another person’s condition from their perspective. You place yourself in their shoes and feel what they are feeling. Empathy is known to increase prosocial behaviors (voluntary behavior intended to benefit another).-Psychology Today
Defining design thinking, Tim Brown the president and CEO of IDEO said:
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
Combining the two: Empathy is then all the efforts put to understand people and the way they do things, what motivates them, their physical and emotional needs, pain points and what is meaningful to them in order to design and innovate for them.
As designers, we have to gain empathy to who our users are, what is really important to them since most of the time the problems we are trying to solve are usually not our own.
Best solutions come out of the best insights into user behavior. Learning to recognize those insights is harder than most designers think because we filter out a lot of information without realizing it. This is where empathy comes into play as it gives us the eyes to learn and see these things.
I have bitterly came to learn that stories told by users and things they say they do, even if they are different from what they actually do are deep indicators of how they see the world.
All those good designs out there are built on a solid understanding of these user beliefs and values. As designers, we should engage with users directly as this reveals a tremendous amount about the way they think and the values they hold.
So how should we empathize as designers?
1.Observing users
Cultivate a culture of viewing users and their behavior in the context of their lives. Pay attention to the disconnect between what a user says and what he does. — Most powerful realizations come from this
2. Engaging users
Think of interviews as the best place to practice this. Try to make the interviews feel more like a conversation. Keep the conversation only loosely bound and elicit stories from the users you talk to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled conversations.
3. Watching User and listening to them
This is an outcome of combining the first two steps. Ask users to show you how they complete a task. Let your users talk you through why they are doing what they do as they physically go through the steps. Have a conversation in the context of someone’s home or workplace. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.
Finally moving from empathy, designers should work to drawing conclusions from that work, As a designer you need to process all the things you heard and saw in order to understand the big picture and get the takeaways of it all. Unpacking is a chance to start that process — share what you found with fellow designers and capture the important parts in a visual form. Gather all the information out of your head and onto a wall where you can start to make connections
Post user pictures, post quotes, maps journeys or experiences — anything that captures impressions and information about your users.
