Want to ‘learn’ empathy? Dine in the dark.
A product designer must understand who they are designing a product for, and why they need it.
Not just understand them on a demographic level, as a mere statistic, but on a human level. As people with unsaid needs and emotions.
This is achieved through an empathic, human-centred approach to design — by putting oneself in another’s shoes. That requires being part engineer, part ergonomist, and part anthropologist.
When you design with empathy, you immerse yourself in the textures and tones of the customer experience. You consider what someone feels, thinks, and does in different contexts. You pick up on their unarticulated requirements. Doing so requires practicing the art of observation and checking your familiarity bias.
Which is why I recommend all designers, product managers, and business leaders — or anyone, really — to experience dining in the dark.
A dark dinner is exactly what it sounds like: you eat in a pitch black restaurant, simulating how the blind might experience a meal. Many dark restaurants employ blind or visually impaired waiters. For them, restaurant routines are just that: routine.
But to a person of five senses, it is a great way to feel like a newborn placed into a cradle designed by M.C. Escher. Or, more usefully, to enter a gateway to the fourth dimension of customer-centricity. The feel dimension.
Observe how you stumble to your seat, the way you paw around the table for the cutlery, the disorientation of stabbing blindly at the plate. There are ways you’re supposed to engage with the food, but you don’t have a guide. It’s like playing Catan without knowing the rules.
You’ll discover that something intuitive, even self-explanatory, for one person can be completely foreign and challenging to someone else. Dining in the dark is taking a seat in that foreignness.
An example based on a friend’s personal experience: “When I was first learning English, one of the phrases I was most often confronted with was, ‘objects in mirror are closer than they appear.’ In North America it is common to find this written on the side mirrors of cars. Not knowing the nuances of then and than, I always wondered how close objects needed to be before they mysteriously made themselves known. As if a magic moment came along and, voila, an object appears. Whoever designed car mirrors was not empathetic to the grammatically impaired.”
Design tip: Avoid homophones.
The businesses benefit of empathic design is that it can significantly reduce product development overhead. As economist and MIT professor Eric von Hippel explains, it can reveal “opportunities to commercialize innovations existing users have already developed.” Every time a person interacts with your product or service, they leave clues about how it can be improved. Only through vicariously experiencing their desires and frustrations can you pick up on them.
With holiday team dinner season around the corner, what better time to book a table and develop some company-wide empathy?
No BS is an innovation studio that uses the design sprint to help companies solve real challenges, design meaningful products & services, and develop mindful user and customer experiences. We have created products & services for startups, companies, and NGOs operating in health tech, mobility, food tech, artificial intelligence, blockchain, mindfulness, fitness, and many other industries.
Visit us at nobsstudio.com
