How to foster empathy in your team to build a caring online coaching tool
Empathy is key to helping somebody. But fostering empathy in a team can be a real challenge. Here are some simple tricks for you and your team.
Coaching someone is not an easy task. Helping them see which steps to take is one thing, but helping them find the energy to take them to their goal is quite another… Things get more complicated when your coach is an automated digital tool. Fancy another challenge? Your coach is trying to solve a massive structural social problem.
After few years working on an employment coaching tool, I realized the key to getting users to focus on your recommendations is empathy. Both by feeling it in the team and communicating it in the product. In this two-part blog post, I will showcase simple tricks and tools to develop empathy in your team, and in your product.
I work for a nonprofit called Bayes Impact. Our mission is to empower people at scale. Back in 2016, we looked at how digital tools are used in job seeking. We found some great products, but we felt that they lacked a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be looking for a job. To make a difference, we would have to provide a more tailored and empowering solution. We wanted to build an effective tool that coaches someone to find a job. Problem was: none of us has experienced unemployment. So how can you design a tool when you’re not the main target?
We chose a guiding principle: constantly challenge our capacity for empathy.
In practical terms, this means:
- Always put ourselves in the user’s shoes
- Take decisions depending on what’s useful for users and not for us
- Keep questioning what we do
Challenging our capacity for empathy needs to be felt through every layer of the product. But your creation is the result of your team, and “be more empathetic” isn’t a task you can simply add on Trello. You need to work on it.
During our “product journey” to build Bob, we used 3 tools to foster empathy in the team:
- User research and user tests
- A chatbot
- An in-house auto-evaluation tool
Let’s go for a quick tour of those tools!
(Those articles are even more useful if you are not the end user of your own product. Uber Eats and Deliveroo’s UX designers are lucky enough to be potential consumers of that delicious poke bowl from around the corner. But if you’re working on malaria or unemployment, hopefully that’s not the case.)
User research and user test: the ultimate treasure hunt
Coaching someone starts by listening to her/him. You need to put yourself in their shoes and avoid your own biases. No one wants to be that gym coach jerk that tells you to lift 100kg without asking you if you’ve done any weights before. You will be confronted to real users and that’s the best way to develop your empathy.
User research
It’s all about listening to the people you want to help. Listening for real, not chasing after that delicious feeling of being right. Your job here is not to turn up with an issue to tackle already in mind. Your job is to observe different user pathways during your research, so you can choose one issue you want to address. A user researcher needs to be a sponge. You should “absorb” all information possible, in order to define several ways your product can intervene in what you see. Doing this process will help you to make user problems your problems, and that’s the first step to develop empathy.
Pro tip: you should go where the people are. Places can teach you a lot of things. In our case, we went to Pôle emploi centers (the French unemployment bureau) to observe what the unemployed people have to go through when they are looking for a job.
Once you’ve identified an issue, create a prototype to solve it, and come back to your users. You need to be sure that the product you will make is really helping people to solve the problems you have identified. Especially if you’re not the target of your own product.
Welcome to user tests!
You will look like a punching ball. Your users will give you a tone of hard feedback. You will get hurt. But that feels good. Be capable of receive feedback, analyse it and learn is another key to develop empathy. As it’s often said, feedback is the breakfast of champions, and your breakfast can go ugly sometimes. Take notes (you could use Airtable, Productboard, Notion…). Be humble. The motto: don’t go to a user test with something in mind you want to hear, but with something you want to make clearer. I personally advise focusing the user test on 3–4 features to avoid testing your whole product, as it can be overwhelming. And you don’t want to drown during your breakfast, do you?
During user research and user tests: be a detective, not a lawyer. You’re looking for a better understanding of your users’ issues and product problems; not arguments to advocate for your prototypes.
Chatting with your user: care and empathy for all!
The main problems with user research and user tests is that they take time. And as time is money, just a small part of your team will be involved. To make sure everyone in your team can develop their empathy by talking with real users, a good tool is chat.
A chat is usually seen as a customer relationship tool, mainly to answer profound questions like “Hi, how do I (…) (insert action here)”. For us, it is first of all a wonderful way to hear about the problems and day-to-day lives of our users, if you make the effort to deep dive into a meaningful conversation with them. When the conversation is more limited to how they use the tool, troubleshooting any issues they have with the tool gives actionable insights into user interactions.
Chatting online has its downsides compared to in-person user research, but it also has huge perks: it’s flexible and can get everyone involved. Plus, you don’t have to find people who are up for testing your tool rather than user tests. They already come by themselves.
Pro tips: as with user tests, be sure to take notes on the feedback but also try to stay focused on the main features or problems you intended to investigate. Chatting online with your users can bring about fulfilling exchanges, reminding you that you have an impact on people’s lives. A great way to start the day.
Auto-evaluation tool: cover the whole scope!
Moreover, both user research/tests and chat have some bias. They cover maybe 5 or 10 percent of your use cases. So you need to dig further to find other users and make sure you also help them properly.
We looked at this issue, and came up with a tailored answer. We ended up building a small product in our own lab. We simply called it the auto-evaluation tool. In our case, it randomly picks one of our jobseeker use cases (without any personal information) and outputs the pieces of advice we gave them. Using the auto-evaluation tool allows each member of our team to discover new cases by quickly understanding who the users are and see which problems they have. We also plugged in our algorithmic tool to see if our recommendations matched the team member’s evaluation.
In this example, our algorithm has great advice in theory: the user should focus her job search on being more mobile, so as to increase her employment opportunities. It might be a great piece of advice overall, but it is not very empathetic when you look at her life situation: a single mum who told us she doesn’t want to commute away from her town.
This manual review process by members of the team led us to change the order of the pieces of advice we have. For example, she could work on her cover letters (less life-changing than moving out of town for a job), and looking for a job opportunity in another place would be a secondary focus. Then, we integrated this rule into the algorithm to fit users in the same situation. That’s how human empathy can also strongly improve algorithmic tools.
This tool is definitely a great way to better understand people’s problems, but also to show each team members how their job impacts these people’s lives.
If you have any other tips or tools to increase empathy in your team, feel free to share them in the comments.
In the next part of this article, we will see what this “challenging your capacity for empathy” in your team could look like in your product.
Thanks for reading.
