Reflection — Empathy mapping: The first step in design thinking!
What does empathy means?
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another!
I bet conversing something similar with a girl will definitely make her feel ‘Aww…!’ (*Just kidding*)
Over the past years of experience, in professional field of-course (*wink*), I learnt that empathy is the primary attribute, a designer requires in order to resolve/design a product.
I always wonder what if a designer doesn’t have any ‘empathy bone’ in his body! Will he still able to adapt the system and design for the users?
(*curious face emoticon*)
Empathy is more of a feeling than a design process! I believe that if a designer can’t empathize the user than he cannot develop a productive design for them! At the end, the user is the one who is going to use the product and not the designer. Hence, I believe that the designer needs to put his feet in the users’ boots!
‘Oouchh.. The shoes are a bit small!’
The article projects some decent methods and illustrations to direct the designers on how to initialize a design thinking! Being a newbie to the field, I found it quite interesting to learn new techniques on how to develop user-centered designs.
The most fascinating part for me was the ‘quadrant’ section, where four categories are sorted in relation with the user so as to attain maximum data from the user.
Further, extracting the research data into personas will help in resolving the empathy mapping, which eventually lead to develop decent user-centered designs!
It’s fascinating how the method tackles diverse areas to record user data evaluating the users’ needs and transforming the data into essentials for developing a comfortable user interface.
