Empathy For Dummies
Your decision to take the word ‘Dummies’ to heart and literally can be only influenced if you read along.
Therefore before you start to contemplate between burning me at the stake or using a gulliotine on me for referring to readers as “dummies”, read this article a little further. (thanks in advance 😊 😊)
In the world of creating, thinking, writing, designing and many other “INGs”, the word -EMPATHY- find its way to everyone vocabulary in the creative space and that is absolutely amazing.
Amazing because it is one word that is thrown around in every design talks and stakeholders meeting 😂😂.
A Bit Of History (Though I Am Terrible At It 🙈🙈)
“Empathy” was coined in 1909 by British psychologist Edward B. Titchener. While the word’s spelling borrows from an ancient Greek word, empátheia, which meant “passion,” Titchener used “empathy” for the purpose of translating a German word (einfühlungsvermögen) and its concept of shared feeling.
IDEO in their “Human-Centered Design Toolkit” defined empathy as:
A deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for.
😂 I can bet that the picture meme above resonates with you and your head says, “Oh! I can relate. My mom always replies me like that 😊 ”. That feeling that led to you saying “I can relate” is an empathic feeling because you can ‘relate’ with the above statement. Either you have experienced it or someone close to you did or as a parent you replied your child that way. This is empathy in a layman’s understanding.
Alan Cooper in “About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design” says:
the closer the represented model comes to the user’s mental model, the easier he will find the application to use and understand.
Which means a designer or creative in any other path might have to spend more time talking to users and less time doing other ‘stuff’.
So whatever you are hoping to create, it has to be applicable to the user’s mental model else it’s just another design that won’t come to life. So breath in some empathy into your design thinking process.
What Empathy Is Not
We have almost had enough talk about what empathy is but not what empathy is not.
- Empathy Is Not About You
Elina Zheleva in her “Designers Have No Empathy” article said — Designers are not empathic, they are ambitious. Their true goal is to deliver great design.
This is fair enough as a designer should be concerned about showcasing his creative skills. However, a product design process is successful only if a user is satisfied with the creativity and is in sync with it.
Wikipedia defines empathic design as a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user’s feelings towards a product. Note, it is the user’s feelings not yours.
Attention is centered on the user and the kind of experience you hope a user would get from your design. The highest form of satisfaction and feeling of achievement is when a user can resonate with your creativity else you loose your audience.
What is the essence of a product that a user does not find satisfaction in? So learn to have a pre-experience of your user’s feelings towards your creative work.
- Empathy Is Not Allowing Users To Be Overly Opinionated
Inasmuch as user research is paramount, you can’t underrate the knowledge of a designer about his craft in the process of designing. According to a writer who I can’t remember his/her name right now once said — “empathic-design methods won’t replace market research, rather, they contribute to the flow of the design process”.
So don’t be scared of a user making decisions for you but don’t give unnecessary room for users to be overly opinionated about your design thinking process.
- Empathy Is Not Sympathy
This words have been used interchangeably overtime but there is a difference which I would spell out now.
Empathy is the act of understanding and experiencing another person’s feelings while Sympathy is an inclination to acknowledge and care about the sufferings of others and try to provide comfort and assurance.
The key word in the difference is the word — EXPERIENCE. Either as an individual going about his/her business or as a creative person, experiencing and understanding how your user has felt, is feeling and would feel about your product is key to a successful work. Sympathy only makes you express care for your user’s pain but empathy makes you have a full grasp into their emotional and psychological wants.
In Your Users’ Shoe
It is usually said: “only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches”. No one knows better where the shoe hurts than he who wears it. It is hard to fully understand how much someone is going through except you experience it.
Just like how Virtual Reality works, once you put on the VR gear, you get to experience a predesigned world and your brain begins to see this virtual reality as the real world.
The moment you put on your VR gear, you are in a different world of experience that you can alter and manipulate if you so please.
Entering into the shoes of your user is the same as this. Hence empathy is the act of developing a deep empathic understanding of user’s unarticulated needs.
User Interface (UI) designer plans the visuals — image, color, illustrations, icons, buttons etc
User Experience (UX) designer plans the navigation of the already planned visuals and the way the design would flow into each other seamlessly.
All this can’t be appropriately done without having a glimpse into your user’s problem that you are trying to provide a solution to.
But the real question is:
How deep do you need to dive in to experience a user’s feeling?
I hope to write about this some day.
