Has our obsession with empathy gone too far?
Empathy has reached the method equivalent of a buzzword. It’s become a de facto element of design proposals, with little thought or reflection as to how feasible or helpful true empathy will be to the project. This approach runs the risk of missing actual user needs by over-relying on an imperfect method.
Officially, Oxford Languages describes empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Unofficially, I’ve often heard people describe empathy as the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes; to feel what they feel, relate to them beyond the superficial, and share in their lived experience. Empathy is heralded as a key tenant of User-Centred Design (UCD) and is held as a foundational skill for anyone learning about design thinking.
There is no doubt that caring about your users’ experiences has resulted in better designs and relating to them on a human level can make it easier to prioritise their needs. Design powerhouses like IDEO and Nielson Norman Group have long described how empathy can be a powerful tool, especially when transitioning away from more traditional business or organisational led design. However, the act and experience of empathy shouldn’t be the only tool used to bring user-centeredness into your design process. If not applied with care, empathy can be used to over generalise populations, justify decisions made from a place of bias, and result in a loss of objective problem solving. Instead of over-relying on empathy, design teams should be going back to the source — users themselves — through employing diverse design teams, conducting in-depth, and contextually immersive user research (as Josh explored in his blog), co-creating with users, and performing continuous user testing. As designers, we shouldn’t conflate the emotional experience of empathising with the practice of designing for users’ emotions.
Trying to wear thousands of shoes all at once
One of the first key pitfalls of empathy is that it doesn’t scale. Empathy — truly feeling what another person is feeling can be a lot to handle when it’s a single person you’re working with. However, rarely are we designing a product or service for one person, or even one persona. How feasible is it then, to truly empathise with 10 or 20 different people? What about hundreds? Some organisations mitigate this issue by focusing on a target market, defining their user group as a specific segment of the population. But that isn’t always possible or ethical, for example in the public sector, where services and solutions need to be used by millions of people at all different life stages and life circumstances. With infinite possibilities of intersectional identities, how can we as designers purport to be empathising with everyone? How do we choose who is worth our finite emotional energy and who isn’t?
What ends up happening when we try to empathise with everyone is that we start to make assumptions. We begin to take shortcuts by superimposing our own experiences, feelings and biases onto our users and labelling it as empathy. When you think about it, putting ourselves in others’ shoes, is literally that, putting our own thoughts, feelings and baggage into what we imagine their life feels like. No matter the number of discovery interviews or walk-alongs you conduct, it’s naïve to think that as designers we know enough about our users to act as their proxy or to know what their lives truly look and feel like. Too often we use empathy as a trojan horse for our own biases to flow through to design, using phrases such as “if I were them, I would want x” instead of engaging with our users directly.
I just have a lot of feelings
Over-vectoring on empathy can lead to designing from a place of emotion, rather than designing for emotions. As a result, we can lose our ability to plan, prioritise, and compromise. Our role as designers is to develop solutions which prioritise and centre our users’ needs, but which also satisfy the surrounding business, data, security and legal requirements. When balancing and incorporating the various needs of multiple user groups with these other requirements, a degree of objectivity is required. By focusing too much on our own emotions and feelings gained from empathy, we can lose the valuable position we have as a rational and logical decision maker. When a user perspective is required we should be inviting our users into the design process, not using empathy as a substitute. There is a non-trivial difference between knowing and caring about the feelings of your users and actually feeling the feelings of your users. I would argue that as designers, we are better served by compassion and understanding than empathy.
From buzzwords back to basics
In conclusion, this is not an article against user-centred design. It’s actually the opposite. It’s an article about how we can more thoughtfully and productively design for users by not using empathy as a substitute for the foundational methods of UCD like contextual user research and co-creation. When relying on empathy we can too easily slip into a place of feeling like we know what we don’t and making generalisations which lose the specificity of user needs. Finally, over-vectoring on true empathy is often not actually that helpful, as we begin to act as user proxies instead of problem-solvers.
Compassion is key. Caring is key. Putting our users at the centre of design decisions from the beginning to the end is key. But maybe empathy isn’t the panacea that it’s been laid out to be.
By Michelle Aker — Service Designer, Deloitte Digital
