Turning Empathy Into Action
What product designers can learn from people who work in human services
As product designers, empathy for our users is more than important, it’s essential. But sometimes, if we’re too deep in the weeds, it’s hard to see the bigger picture. Designers see the word empathy often. We hear about it at every conference, read about it in UX articles, and find it on every job description.
Empathy and perspective-taking are foundational for any good designer. What sets apart the good from the great, however, is knowing how to take that empathy and turn it into action.
People who work in human services (social workers, teachers, counselors, therapists, etc.) are great at this. They need to have empathy, and lots of it. A therapist needs to take the perspective of their patient. A social worker goes into her clients’ homes to put herself in their shoes.
But, what many people don’t talk about is this — human service workers know when to stop defining their clients’ problems and start solving them. Not all designers are great at this. I’ve seen many designers get stuck in the weeds, trying to learn everything about the user before they can start designing.
Prior to being a designer, I worked as a speech-language therapist. Let’s talk about an example of a typical client I might’ve seen, and what designers can learn about turning empathy into action:
Let’s say a new client comes into my office. He’s 5 years old, and we’ll call him John. John has an autism diagnosis. His language is delayed and he has the cognitive abilities of a two-year-old. Additionally, John has a phonological disorder (difficulty pronouncing certain sounds). This makes it hard to understand some of the words he uses. He also has difficulty with pragmatic language (language he uses in social situations).
John’s profile is complex. He is different than every other child that will walk through my door. I could spend years trying to understand his world, but I will never have all the information. Despite this, I eventually need to get out of the weeds and begin to provide the care he needs. The skilled human service worker does 3 things to turn empathy into action. Let’s talk about what those things are and what product designers can learn from them:
1. Have a vision
Your vision is the future state you’re striving towards. It’s understanding where you’re headed and why. It’s a statement that your team can rally behind.
When working with John, a speech-language therapist needs to have a vision. A long-term vision for John might be: John will communicate effectively with his peers at school. His frustrations will lessen and his social connections will improve. This is a vision we can share with his parents and teachers. Everyone can rally behind it. And, as long as we refer to it often, we know that his parents will practice his speech and language with him at home. We’ll all work hard on the short-term steps to get to this future version of John.
Designers also need to have a vision. This doesn’t mean that our end state is completely designed up front. Rather, it’s a statement we can use to guide our decisions. It’s the what and the why behind our project.
My team at ezCater is working to maximize customer service efficiency, and our vision is that our customer service team will be given the necessary tools and processes to do their job efficiently, ensuring consistent and fantastic customer experiences. When deciding whether or not to tackle a new challenge, our vision guides us. For instance, a page may be missing effective visual hierarchy. But, if we know that improving it won’t lead us to our ultimate vision, we put this particular challenge on the shelf. We don’t have time to do everything, so we have to prioritize what will meet the needs of our users and our business.
For any decision we make, we can ask ourselves: does this align with our vision?. Our team has a statement that everyone can align on. When we’re aligned and can imagine an end state, everyone is motivated to get to there as fast as we can.
2. Time-box your data collection
You need to understand your users’ pain points and motivations, but you can’t know everything about them. When do you have enough information?
Since many human service workers work within the constraints of health insurance (and health insurance only covers so much), patient evaluations must be time-boxed. They are forced to make decisions based off of limited data. In turn, they have to begin designing a treatment right away. And they are accountable for delivering results and reaching goals quickly. Therefore, it’s important to prioritize short-term goals and check consistently to make sure they are on track towards their vision.
In the case of John, his treatment plan comprises not only the long-term vision (John will communicate effectively with his peers at school. His frustrations will lessened and his social connections will improve), but also actionable short-term goals that I can measure frequently (John will use appropriate language in a mock social situation, without prompting, in 80% of attempts). This allows me to start treating him sooner, knowing that I’ll revisit my treatment plan and re-evaluate my approach if we’re not reaching our targets. Lots of upfront data collection wasn’t necessary, because I’m constantly checking to make sure we’re staying on track. Trying and tracking solutions helped me to understand how to get John to where he needs to be.
As a product designer, time-boxing data collection helps me to get to a solution more effectively. Trying several solutions and tracking their success allows me to produce higher-quality designs.
When we’re starting to define a problem, we fill in gaps in our knowledge about the user. If solving a specific problem will have a massive impact for our user and our business, we may spend more time in this discovery phase. However, as soon as we have the problem defined and start to see patterns in the data (qualitative or quantitative), we start sketching solutions. Like the human service worker, we know we can iterate on our solutions if we learn (through concept testing, A/B testing, etc.) that they aren’t meeting our initial goals.
At ezCater, we foster a culture of learning and constant iteration. This allows us to quickly move towards validating concepts in a more focused way.
3. Prioritize and have a plan of action
A challenge with having a lot of empathy can be wanting to fix everything at once, but, for complex problems, this just isn’t possible. Instead, we must prioritize and create an action plan, working to solve the most impactful issues first.
For difficult cases, human service workers can’t solve every challenge at the same time. They must figure out which diagnoses are most impacting their clients’ daily lives. In John’s case, the speech-language therapist would likely prioritize treating his language skills (vocabulary and grammar, language comprehension, social skills language, etc.) over his phonological disorder (how his speech sounds). Treating his language first would likely result in the biggest improvement in his quality of life, because this will get him closer to being able to communicate effectively with his peers at school (our vision). It’s a trade-off, but one that has to be made due to the time constraints and the complexity of the problem.
Product designers must also prioritize and make trade-offs to solve thorny problems. We focus our efforts on solutions that will have the biggest impact on our users’ pain points. Business stakeholders may ask us to solve all of our users’ problems, but we sometimes have to find the “good enough” solution. Prioritize what will have the most payoff for the combination of your users and your business.
At ezCater, we prioritize by contrasting impact against effort. What will have the biggest impact for our business, and how much effort will it take? When we take on a new problem, we can categorize it as a quick win, an impactful big swing, a fill-in during a slow time, or something not even worth tackling. Similar to the human service worker, this helps us to budget our time and make trade-offs to reach our vision.
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For people with a lot of empathy, it’s important to get out of our own heads. It’s human nature to develop assumptions, attachments, and biases, which can often distract us from the problem we’re trying to solve. Ask for help. Get feedback from people who don’t understand your problem space. You can take it or leave it, but it allows you to get a perspective different from your own.
Empathy is your designer superpower. It lets you advocate for your users and understand their problems on a deep level. Harness that empathy by knowing when and how to take action.
