A little empathy, please?

On how a little bit of empathy can make your logical design decisions more effective.

Recently, I was flying from Trivandrum to Mumbai. It was an early morning flight. I finished my security check formalities and was waiting for the boarding call in the lobby.

In the distance I could hear a very muffled announcement. A lot of my fellow passengers were curious about the annoucement but it was so indistinct that they assumed there will be a separate announcement in the lobby but no such announcement came. The same thing happened a second and then a third time. Every time the annoucement was played, all the passengers in the lobby would try to listen. No body could understand what was being announced until one of the passengers said that they were announcing the security check in for our flight.

The logic that the airport authorities have used here is pretty straightforward. Since the people in the lobby have already finished their security check in, there was no need for them to hear that announcement. The only announcement that was applicable to them was the boarding calls.

Well, perfect logic right? but unfortunately the design of the airport was such that, whatever announcement was made in one corner was audible everywhere else. Now, somebody has thought through this system before implementing it and the person was perfectly logical but what he lacked was empathy, the willingness to put himself in the passenger’s shoes and think about the problem.

Most of the passengers from this small town belong to the mid income level bracket and fly occasionally. They spend a lot of their hard earned money in booking these flight tickets and don’t want to miss their flights. On top of this many are first time fliers who don’t have much clue about flying. They don’t mind listening to a few extra announcements, what really scares them is missing an announcement, a fact proved by the anxious looks on their face when a hardly audible security checkin announcement was being made.

The worst mistake that a designer can make while designing is to assume that their users are perfectly logical beings. A little bit of empathy can make you a better designer.

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design” — Dieter Rams