Empathy 101: Designing Effective Experiences, with Designers from Etsy
Prior to the Post Design Thinking workshop, Team Panacea had run a high-speed design sprint called “Project in a Day.” Still fresh from our mini-sprint (a sprint within a sprint within a sprint, etc.), we spent the late afternoon with Etsy Product Designer Kristen Leach and Etsy Design Strategist Michael Yap, learning the ins and outs of designing user experiences with empathy.
From this experience, we got a brand new perspective on the beginnings of our project and lots of great validation from Kristen and Michael which warmed our burgeoning UX hearts. This also gave us a great way to step back and look at the big picture with our capstone prep and ongoing education. Seeing real designers in industry using the tools and techniques we studied in class gave us the authenticated feeling that we were doing something right.
The following sections are an overview of each activity we did, in sequence. This whole workshop took about 2.5 hours.
Also, an important disclaimer: this workshop was based on our user assumptions as a result of our secondary research thus far. What could make this data a lot stronger is for it to be backed up by actual, in-the-field user research. As Team Panacea has not yet met with our client, these assumptions were appropriate for this workshop.
Some tips before we got started:
- Ask yourself — what is the type of principle you would put into your work?
- How will your product establish trust? At Etsy, Michael explained, trust is described like a well. You must contribute to that well regularly, and its contents will rise and fall, like the water of a well. Negative user experiences draw trust away from the well, lowering its contents and leaving less for other customers as well. The goal is to maintain certain levels of it, even if you are adding to it in drips or buckets at a time.
- Think about how you will establish trust via many movements, not just one. How will you layer trust into every moment?
1. Empathy Maps: How Users Think, Say, Do and Feel
At the beginning of our design workshop, we started an empathy map to better understand possible users of our product. Within this map, we focused on different aspects of this user’s personality, including things they may think, say, do, or feel while using the product. One of the goals of this exercise was to find and point out potential discrepancies and inconsistencies in what people say and do, think and feel, and how to identify said discrepancies.
Tips for Empathy Mapping:
- Consider connections, contradictions, and pains & gains within what you’ve written down
- Consider who the user is speaking to; would they be honest with some people in their life, and dishonest with others? For example, since our context is healthcare, would our user be more honest with her pharmacist or insurance provider vs. her family? (In our case, the answer was yes)
- What context are these quotes, thoughts, and emotions occurring in? How can that change these points?
Through this process, we came up with a rich and fleshed out persona: Marla.
Earlier during the day, we had created a different persona for our Project in a Day sprint. We iterated on this persona and changed some key features to make her different. Within the context of the activity (which lasted around 20 minutes), we fleshed out a compelling character with realistic and tangible needs, thoughts, and emotions.
2. Letter to the CEO
After taking a deep dive into Marla’s character, we were then challenged to think about our user in the future. For this exercise, this involved writing a letter to the CEO of our client after having a life-changing experience using our product. During this activity, we kept in mind different features our future product may include as well as ways the product may impact the user that aren’t explicitly feature-focused. For example, we explored how this product might make our user feel taken care of, and then worked backwards to see how that could be facilitated via the product.
3. Customer Journey Mapping
Following the CEO letters, we continued to think about the full end-to-end experience of our user, tracing the journey of our hero Marla as she undergoes a hip replacement surgery. Building upon our empathy map scaffolding, we marched forward into Marla’s experience, seeking an even deeper understanding of what our users need from our product.
Within this process, we identified key phases of Marla’s journey, including preparing for surgery, recuperating in the hospital, and then coming home to heal with her home support system. We drew from the empathy map, CEO letters, and previous knowledge of customer journey maps to construct a detailed timeline of Marla’s experience, pinpointing places where our product could be of the most assistance.
Tips for Customer Journey Mapping:
- Think about how the motivation for your product defines this journey
- Identify pain points: large discrepancies of emotion during a certain phase of the journey (similar to Empathy Mapping, but on a timed scale)
- We didn’t have time for this, but it is helpful to create a different stakeholder’s journey map as well, and see where the customer’s pain points match up with theirs
4. Future Ideation
We were then invited to take one part of our Customer Journey (ideally the biggest pain point/point for opportunity) and incorporate a futuristic endeavor into it.
The Etsy team demonstrated to us the Futures Cone, a famous model of future-casting developed by Hancock and Bezold (1994) to show how hard it can be to think about possible futures since they have the potential to deviate so wildly. The future is full of possibilities and from that we were encouraged to not merely consider “futures” but possible (could happen via a believable chain of events), plausible (could potentially happen — unexpected changes from the norm, e.g. natural disasters), and probable (likely to happen based on current trends) futures This allowed us to ideate without many restrictions within the context of our persona — Marla’s — journey.
While some of our ideas were based on existing technology, we did draw inspiration from different popular TV shows and movies to think of near futures as well as futures a few steps ahead of those.
5. Evaluation
After coming up with a handful of different ideas, we were tasked with evaluating these ideas against different layers of societal evolution, called Pace Layers.
Many systems in our world are interconnected, but on different timetables. The pace layers model explains the different speeds in which various layers of society move. Brand’s model explains that the layers of a system operate mostly independently, but neighboring layers influence and respond to each other accordingly. Fast layers, like fashion and commerce, move quickly and adapt easily to new ideas and innovation. Fashion changes daily. Slower layers, like culture and governance, take a bit more time and are more resistant to change. A change in government can take weeks, to months, to years.
For this workshop, Kristen & Michael encouraged us to think about how our ideated futures could potentially impact different layers of the system. We ran out of time on this exercise, but it was a good demonstration of reframing our product to meet certain needs. For example, what if a new law was enacted that didn’t allow online healthcare anymore? Something as dramatic as this could be the end of our product, unless we take the time to consider opportunities within that context ahead of time. That is why, once we have a stronger idea of our end goal, we want to go back and reframe our product, and explore Pace Layers on a deeper level.
Reflection
All in all, we had a great opportunity to talk with Kristen and Michael about their design strategies. We truly valued the chance to hear about how industry designers approach product design problems with empathy and keep the user in mind from start to finish. It was heartening to see our teachings reflected in industry in this way, and I think a definite sign of the changing landscape of UX.
Empathy is paramount for your user.
At MHCI, we have two main philosophies:
- Put the user first.
- You are not the user.
There are others, such as productive failure, failing fast, and taking a critical approach to design rationale, but we will explore these more in the next phases of our project.
Through this workshop, we got to identify our assumptions and potentially uncover blind spots ahead of time. It was also good to get in the client’s shoes; to get into the details. This workshop was essentially a moment of pause to take in real empathy, but it was one of many. We plan to take several more pauses.
Thanks to Kristen & Michael for letting us work on a real-world problem, and being so involved in the process, especially under such tight time constraints.
About this PublicationWe’re writing the MHCI 2019 Capstone: Team Panacea Publication for a couple of reasons.First, we want to give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of our capstone experience: the successes, failures, thoughts, insights, and innovations.Second, we would love to engage with you around the healthcare domain (Pittsburgh’s #1 industry!), so please follow / clap👏👏👏 / comment / share /reach out to us — we’d love to hear your thoughts
