Want a Way to Build Your Company’s Culture of Empathy? Start Designing for Real People
By encouraging the development of stress cases in design, companies can promote and teach empathy
I recently read Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech and one concept she presented became a real a-ha moment for me: stress cases. This concept is fleshed out in a book called Design for Real Life, co-authored by Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer, which I subsequently devoured.
Stress cases replaces the idea of edge cases in design: instead of thinking about the extreme problems or situations of users and relegating them to exceptions, it calls on designers to consider tough life situations when someone may use their product, to think about how to make things for people at their most vulnerable and to consider accessibility and inclusion.
Creating stress cases is a practice in compassion. Building empathy in user experience (UX) design is not a new discussion and there are many articles that provide practical tips and self-improvement techniques; empathy can be taught to people, like a muscle. But Wachter-Boettcher and Meyer suggest compassion as the approach because it goes beyond just cognitive empathy: it’s about having a genuine emotional feeling and accepting people as they are.
Beyond getting into the user’s shoes, Wachter-Boettcher and Meyer “like to think of compassion as a spirit of generosity: assuming that our users have it tough, and being not only willing but happy to let go of our own desires to make things easier for them.”
When I read about the idea of stress cases, I felt sheepish that I hadn’t even known about the idea of edge cases when managing the creation and redesign of websites several years ago. In the projects, I remember only asking our design company to consider our expected range of users/audience, including those in lower resource settings, and to keep them in mind during development. At that time, I had not yet been introduced to approaches in UX design because it was detached from my non-profit world bubble. This was my blind spot.
While it seems like a monumental task just to try to shift to a new paradigm in the design process, the books still left me wondering what the wider value-added to business could be with this approach. If you make better products and content with stress cases, you could potentially increase revenue, save money or decrease risk. Beyond these direct impacts, what could be the benefits?
Compassion is not a term business is typically comfortable with using, but empathy has started to make inroads. Empathy makes good business sense. Empathy is a competency in emotional intelligence, which, research shows, contributes to the bottom line in business. Business leaders agree that soft skills, specifically empathy, are key to have in today’s economy, in part because it helps to know who audiences are and what they want.
The Businessolver 2019 State of Workplace Empathy study, which has been running for a few years, shows that empathy in a workplace leads to tangible business outcomes, particularly with recruitment, engagement and retention. A large majority of c-suite executives recognize the need for more empathy in their workplace, but 58% of CEOs struggle to consistently exhibit empathetic behaviour.
Employees see empathy when companies implement strategies to increase diversity and inclusion. Empathy can also be demonstrated by personal time off, financial well-being, mental health support, flexible working conditions and personal connections from leadership.
The study concludes that “empathy must be in the fabric of an organization’s culture.” But to do this, companies need to move beyond just a human resources approach. By recognizing the importance of stress cases in everyday design, companies have a practical and hands-on tool to integrate and teach empathy. Design for Real Life sets out several approaches in order to learn from users and build not just empathy but compassion when developing these stress cases.
Through the design process, companies and their leadership have an opportunity to build empathy within their culture and among employees. Through a compassionate approach, we can see people as they are and design to truly improve their lives and make an impact.
Further reading:
Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You (Charlie Owen)
Design for Real Life (excerpt)
Stress Cases and Data Visualization (Meagan Longoria)
People, People! (Intrepid)
Why Designing for Accessibility is a Must in 2017 (Mobify)
Design for Humanity: A New Perspective on User Experience (Udemy)
