King of the Hill and the stage of empathizing
This piece of writing was created and uploaded as part of the course “Introduction to Advertising and Public Relations”, taught by Betty Tsakarestou.
The stage of empathizing is the first step of the 5 stage Design Thinking Process and very important one at that, because it involves consulting experts and non- to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations and have a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved. That is also why empathy is the stage of the process we revisited the most throughout our journey at King of the Hill.
At the very beginning we came in contact with people from different fields of study and interest groups because we wanted to capture a glimpse of their initial impressions of our project. We heard a lot of different opinions and ideas during this process of empathizing, but most importantly the entire procedure resulted in a few more clear, concise, and even sometimes contradicting deductions. After we examined the conclusions of every one of our 33 person sample more closely, we tried to categorize all their suggestions with the purpose of using them for the development of our project. More specifically, we had gathered proposals of very general content, such as some doubts on the idea of competition, but there were also suggestions of more practical nature, for example how to make users feel special for using our app/platform. That concluded our first experience trying to empathize with our potential customers.
As far as empathizing goes, what was next was the stage of taking interviews to dig deeper and evolve our understanding of the opinion people had about our platform. By this point we had taken into consideration people’s initial opinions, looked into a few of them with even greater interest and had chosen which we wanted to re-approach and gain more insight from. That’s why we made sure to interview people of various backgrounds. It had become apparent for us from the start that not all people want the same thing and that in order to satisfy as many as possible it is important to know how their needs vary. We were interested in questions like “How will an engineer use our platform?”, “How will a doctor?” In the end of this stage we analyzed the feedback we got and ended up in very useful conclusions. For example, we got into discussions about the issue of anonymity for the safety and convenience of the author, or the variety of topics to satisfy every interest group.
Except for the interviews, a very significant process was the ‘’speed-dating” and the ‘’world café’’ methodologies. These helped us expose weaknesses we hadn’t previously noticed in our startup project and even did a great deal towards solving them. Talking to other people and noticing their reactions is of vital importance when it comes to a startup company that aims to, at some point in time, make profit because such thing will never happen if what you create is of no interest to customers.
We believe that ‘’empathy’’ is crucial to a human-centered design process considering that what is gathered at this stage is a substantial amount of information to use to progress to the next stage and to develop the best possible understanding of the users, their needs, and the problems that underlie the development of that particular product.
The King of the Hill team consists of:
