Human Empathy: Designing for the Love of People.

Over and Over again, the point on what makes a great website has been established not just by me but other great and better ux designers out there.Just in case you are late to the party, and still in a state of confusion as to what makes a website great, i will just tell you for the sake of todays note. There are many things you must consider when considering a website as a great one from usability, functionality, accessibility, findability, the visual and does it help people accomplish their task? all this can be said to be what makes a website great. But to really understand these things well as a designer, you need to focus first on the people who you are designing for.Your approach to building a usable and functional product should be one that focuses on the people who would use the product and their goal and this is what is commonly referred to as user centered design.
As user experience and interaction designers, we spend more time focusing our attention on the users of our products, researching and studying their behaviors to better understand them, their needs and goals and these data we have to properly analyze so as to perfectly come up with a better solution to the challenges faced by the users of the product. it is always a back and forth movement from researching to sketching then prototyping to testing with the intending users and you get feedback then again to prototyping till you get the right product for your users. Even after you have shipped your product, you never stop, it never ends just keep making the product better and better. the research never stops.
This being a very important part of your product, it is important not just to focus on the users but also how you focus on them is important too. See your users not just as users who want to use your products and who you want to make money from but see them as humans just like you,who have a problem and you want to help them solve it with your product. you need to be emphatic towards them.
Empathy means the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.You know their pain points and how the feel and you understand what better ways to help them reach the point of pleasure and joy. A good designer is one who sees users not as users but humans who should be loved and helped to achieve their goals. in simple term a good designer has a heart of empathy for people. A design crafted from a stand point of empathy truly reflects the core of user centered design. you need to love the people you are designing for before you would be able to design better for them. Love is a wonderful feeling. it seeks to please, it seeks to make the other person happy always and better than they were before they met you. And that is what people what to feel when they use our product. The love, the feeling that the product was designed for their good and their good alone. The feeling that what matters is them and you will always be there for them. That’s the feeling people want to have. That is what your product should mean to people.
Examples of products that reflects love for the user are apple, Airbnb, nike,coca-cola and you can add the rest. At least that’s how i feel when i use their products. (No promo intended)
As a designer, you have to learn the art of empathy for those you are designing for and you do that by just been empathetic to humans generally and i mean genuine empathy for humans. We are designers because we love to make things that people love and which makes them happy. design with love.

