Can Language Help Create Empathy?
Isn’t there a better word than “user”? I see my classmates cringe at this word as it is hesitantly written on the flipchart. Some of our industry leaders have even disclosed their distaste for it. So lets look through our thesaurus, shall we?…
Newspaper companies call their customers “readers”, while Starbucks call them “customers”. At the end of last year Facebook reportedly started referring to users as “people”. Disney was on the forefront of this idea and has referred to their customers as “guests” as far back as 1975 in a Walt Disney World booklet:
“…we all work from exactly the same script, speaking the same language…the language of Disney show business…Just like any show, we have an audience, not a crowd, but we go even further. Our audience is composed of guests, not customers.”
So what is the value of referring to your users — *cough* — I mean audience by another name?
Designing with empathy is the best way to create a successful product that people enjoy using. As experience designers we use several different empathetic tools to understand customer needs and emotions, such as personas, user journey maps, or storyboards. These tools help designers and stakeholders recognize customers as humans with emotional connections to the product or service. By using language that helps promote customers as people and not as an “abstraction” we will design better products and services that speak to their needs.
Language Can Affect our Behaviors
There is a connection between the language we use and our behavior. A really fantastic TED talk by Keith Chen highlights the link between the language we speak and our ability to save money. Speakers that use languages without a concept for the future (ones that don’t distinguish between the past, present and future) are statistically proven to be much better at saving money, are 20–24 percent less likely to smoke, 10–17 percent less likely to by obese by the time they retire, and 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. Essentially, the way you perceive time is affected by your grammar, which in turn affects your behavior.
In a 2010 talk, Mike Kruzeniski, the design lead at Twitter, but at the time of his lecture was UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, spoke about the importance of using language to unite members of the design team and engineers by asserting the importance of the emotional and experiential aspects of the design. By using the analogy of the “soul”, “heart”, and “body” instead of prioritizing by “pri 0”, “pri 1”, and “pri 2” respectively, he was able to rally engineers and other members of the team around the visceral concepts of the design, or the “soul”.
The idea of user-centric design is to consider people first, but the result is an abstraction away from the real emotions people have towards a product or service. So that leaves me to ask this question:
