An Exploration of Empathy

A UX Perspective

We as UX Designers are curious by nature. We often spend our time thinking of questions and exploring new ways to better understand the people we build products for. It is through this process that we can succeed in improving the overall experience for those people, while ultimately building a better and more successful product in the long run.

One could argue that having empathy for humans (which includes users, non-users, business stakeholders, etc.) and product success are interconnected; a product that is thought and built in ignorance of this connection will see its growth and adoption limited. Likewise, designers who do not actively seek out to better understand their users through an empathic lens will find their professional growth as a designer inhibited. It was through the realization of these two points that I felt it was important to write an article that explored the concept of empathy, which could then be leveraged by new designers, old designers, and non-designers a-like.

For this article I have three goals: define empathy from the mindset of a ux designer, discuss how to view users through an empathic lens, and finally discuss the importance of maintaining an everlasting empathetic perspective.

Defining Empathy

In order for us to get to the root meaning of empathy it’s important I first identify what is not empathy. Empathy is often mistaken as a synonym for numerous other things, actually if you were to search for synonyms of the word empathy you would be presented with the following alternatives: affinity, appreciation, compassion, insight, pity, rapport, sympathy, and warmth. However, are any of these words true synonyms for the word empathy? Does empathizing with a person mean you simply appreciate them? have compassion for them? Or sympathize with them? The answer is no, succeeding in any of these will only take you a part of the way there.

In an article written by Sarah Gibbons called Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX, she states that, “in an effort to practice empathy, many teams mistakenly practice sympathy.” Although the difference may not be immediately distinguishable, the two concepts have one key difference and that is perspective. I think this is best explained with an example.

Picture yourself at a park, sitting across from your long-time friend. As you two are catching up, reminiscing and sharing stories about the past, the tone becomes serious as your friend reveals they were recently laid off from their job. You feel saddened for your friend’s situation and although you have never lost a job before, you understand that it’s a tough thing to go through, offering to help if your friend needs it. Sympathy therefore, allows you to see and address what is immediately visible to you, attempting to provide a solution merely on those insights alone would be like assessing the structural integrity of a building by only viewing its facade. The insights you take away are that your friend is now unemployed, they are sad and need a friend to help cheer them up. If you had the ability to immediately provide a solution to your friend, you would most likely have them hired back and working again. Problem solved? Maybe, maybe not.

Now, instead of relying on only the information we can easily observe and is readily available to us, let’s look a little deeper by empathizing with that friend and changing our perspective.

This time when your friend tells you they were laid off, you try to see past the facade to get a richer understanding of their situation. There are a few research techniques to do this, but the easiest way is always by starting a meaningful conversation and asking descriptive questions. As your discussion progresses you allow their verbal and non-verbal (body language) responses to guide you further. In doing so you will be better equipped to fill in the gaps and ultimately paint a picture that is clear enough for you to step into, look around and better understand their situation.

Now that you’re able to move beyond the facade, you can see that a year ago they became overworked and burnt out at their job. Your friend started questioning their career path, but felt stuck and unable to make a transition into a different career as they didn’t want to risk jeopardizing their salary which they rely on for car and mortgage payments. Over time, the stress and depression spilled over into their personal life, where they slowly became disconnected with their partner and friends, until finally they were laid off during a major re-org of their department.

Empathy, as you can see, paints a more vivid picture of a person’s experience, affording you the ability to be better equipped to provide a suitable solution. Now from the insights you have gathered, you can see that simply giving your friend their job back actually does not solve the problem at all. Whereas, helping your friend discover a job that would personally fulfill them, while ensuring they have financial stability for their car and mortgage payments would.

As one can imagine, mistaking sympathy for empathy can be quite problematic, especially when the stakes are high and your business’s future relies on you solving the right problem. Now that we know what empathy is not, let’s try to define what empathy is. In a book written by Carl Jung called Psychological Types, he refers to empathy as, “a readiness to meet the object halfway, a subjective assimilation that brings about a good understanding between subject and object, or at least simulates it.” Let’s expand on that concept to help us define what empathy is. Empathy is the ability to adopt the perspective of another person or group of people in order to better comprehend and understand their end-to-end experience and the negative and positive impacts on that experience.

A Look Through an Empathic Lens

As seen in the previous section, adopting an empathic lens affords us with a more rich and unobstructed view of a person’s true experience. In this section we will discuss how to use this lens to better understand our users to build better products.

Looking back at our example, applying the empathic lens perspective equipped us to better solve our friend’s problem but that was an individualistic problem and as you can imagine there are many users that are interacting with our products on a daily basis. If we were to take even a small sample of people who were laid off from their jobs recently, we would discover each and every one of them would hold very unique experiences. Don Norman touches on this point in his article Why I Don’t Believe in Empathic Design, where he states, “Most of the time, in our field, we’re devising products and services that are being used by lots of people — hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions. In Facebook’s case it’s even billions. This means that understanding the individual person is actually not going to be very useful.”

If it is not only impossible but not useful to empathize with each person using our product, why does UX design weigh so heavily on empathy as a driving force for human-centered design? Well, it’s because our goal is not to try and fully understand every single user, but rather to the best of our ability conduct user research using an empathic lens to develop unique personas and insights that captures as much of the variety of people using our product as possible to inform our design decisions and as a result improve the overall user experience.

By utilizing empathy in this way, we can solve our friend’s problem from our example, while at the same time solving the problem of someone else who was laid off in different circumstances and in need of a different solution. Therefore, our empathic lens must act more like the aperture of a camera, allowing us to focus on different depths to ensure we are capturing as many details as possible within our frame, rather than just focusing on one object. The only way to achieve this is through properly executed empathy-driven user research.

Maintaining an Everlasting Empathetic Perspective

As we conduct user research and gather data to form actionable insights, we then must know how to apply those empathy-driven insights into our designs to ensure we are accurately improving the user experience. To start it must be clear that the path from research to data analysis to design is not a linear path when you’re designing with empathy in mind, rather it is a multiple looping pattern. This means that we need to embed the empathic lens into the entire process so that no matter what phase we are currently in we can equip ourselves with the ability to identify gaps and then travel back to help guide the solution.

To better understand this concept let’s bring back our example, but this time in the context of building a product that aims to help a group of people who were recently laid off from their jobs. As discussed in the previous section, we cannot achieve this by empathizing with one person’s experience alone, but rather we need to conduct strategical user research in an attempt to gather the many experiences people within the group have in order to develop a product that aims to improve their collective experience. However, during one of our design critiques another designer points out that a component of our design does not meet accessibility standards.

The solution at this point is not to simply pull up the accessibility guidelines and make the appropriate changes, but to instead double back and see if your personas, user interviews, or other user research captured people with a disability. If the answer is no, then you should begin by asking yourself how someone with a disability may be impacted differently by being laid off, try to conduct some further user interviews and finally add a persona to capture that segment of your group. I love a quote from Roman Krznaric’s book Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get it when he says, “think of empathizing more as an original and exhilarating form of travel,” because that is what we are trying to achieve in UX design. Our goal is to travel from perspective to perspective in order to better understand the people we are trying to provide solutions to.

It is only by continuously instilling an empathetic perspective throughout the entirety of the design process that we will be successfully able to better identify gaps, enrich our designs, and further improve the experience of our products.

Dan Silveira is a UX Designer at IBM based in Toronto. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.