(Don’t) Make ‘em say uhh…

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

The design industry can feel like a pretty insular place to work. Through my various agency / marketing tenures over the years, I can confidently say that the vast majority of my time was spent with people who thought and often looked like me. That workplace homogeny can make it difficult to separate your every day experiences from the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of humans our products serve. So how do we displace from the design echo-chambers of our peers, Dribbble, and more importantly, ourselves? Practice empathy.

Empathy isn’t a commodity or skill to add on a résumé — though sites like Facebook do push empathy as clickable post reactions. It takes practice, patience, and often a substantial change in the way we work. It means not viewing users as ‘test subjects’ but as complicated humans with complicated lives. Luckily, there are a myriad of small and big ways you can incorporate empathy practice into your daily work. Here are a couple of my favorites: listening to people and using human language.

Listening to feedback

Building a successful product means understanding your users. It means meeting users that aren’t like you, open-minded listening, and repeating the process for continual improvement. Once you begin to understand what they care about, what their pain points are, and how you can respond to their needs, you can begin making real, relevant changes to your product.

Designers often have issues with communicating concepts or validating decisions to stakeholders because they feel the need to dumb their ideas down. This “dumbing down” is actually very important in user listening because it’s exactly what you want to pay attention to — language. Product comparisons, examples, and anecdotal stories all aid in making sense of concepts we may not to be able to fully and simply explain. Design tells a story, and we all have different ways of telling stories.

Write simply, communicate clearly

When writing product content, from body copy to headlines, image writing for your grandmother or your spouse — someone you love. Choose your words with care. Language matters just as much as animations, colors, text alignments, and photography. Eliminate industry jargon as much as you can — don’t assume your acronyms or clever names mean anything to anyone else. Lastly, avoid language that intentionally manipulates people into taking actions they don’t want to take.

Image Credit: About Health via The Cruelest Opt Out Forms

Have you read your copy out loud? If it’s clear, human, and doesn’t immediately sound like a scam, you’re on the right track.

Friendlier design

You won’t achieve empathy in design by creating a few personas and tailoring all your decisions to neat boxes. At the most basic level, empathy should be both a goal and a process for trying to understand people, their positions, and their perspectives. It takes work and it often means we have to put the needs and experiences of others first, even through tight deadlines, guidelines, or simply our own stressful lives. Nice people aren’t born nice. It takes practice and embracing being wrong.

Protect America Design

)

Waldy Przybyslawski

Written by

i design things

Protect America Design

The Ones Doing the Things

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade