Empathy interviewing: Get to know your audience
By Dominika Heusinkveld
When designing a new information product for your chosen audience you need to get to know their problems and understand them fully so that you can create a solution that will fill your consumers’ needs. That is where empathy interviews come in.
But first — what is empathy? It is often confused with sympathy, but in fact the two words have somewhat different meanings and implications. Sympathy is feeling compassion or pity for another person or commiserating with them on their misfortune. Empathy runs deeper. It is the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes and understand and share their feelings about a certain issue. In product design, this translates to a deep understanding of the group you are designing for. You are trying to solve a particular group’s information problems, and to do that you need empathy. Remember that the goal is to create a news product that helps connect people to their community. That community may be local or it may be on a national level.
The skills needed for empathy interviewing are ones that many journalists already have. First, you need to set up one-on-one interviews with several people from your chosen demographic (for instance, young professional women with children). Then you create a script of open-ended questions and conversation starters which are designed to elicit the problems this group has with regards to news consumption.
Empathy interviewing techniques can include:
· The 5 Whys: Ask “why” up to five times to get to the root of a problem.
· Ask both specific and broad questions.
· Elicit information about their lives, values, habits, daily schedule, and interests.
· Pay close attention to body language to identify painful points for your intended audience. What really bothers them?
· Stay quiet and let them come up with an answer.
· Make sure your questions focus on problems, not solutions.
· Interview with a partner, if possible, and use a voice recorder so you can pay attention to the person you’re interviewing.
· Ask about specific instances/occurrences: “Tell me about a time when you were looking for information and couldn’t find it.”
· Encourage people to tell you their stories: “Show me how you get your news.”
After each interview, consider filling out an empathy map. This will help you keep track of the key elements of each person and help you think about the problems your group is facing. As you continue the interview process with more people, you will be able to focus your questions more and you will begin to get an idea of what is important to your audience.
