The science of Empathy & how it fits into Experience Design
Because experience isn’t just about numbers and stats — it’s about deeply understanding real people
When you’re engaging with people, whether it be users or your team there’s more to the engagement than just the words that flow between parties. We’ve heard that words make up a very small amount of what’s communicated, but what makes up the rest? And how can we become aware of it to improve our research, our teamwork and our collaboration?
The Science
The word empathy has its origins in the German word ‘einfuhlung’ which literally translates as ‘feel into’. This is a really nice way to think about empathizing — to actively feel into a moment and what’s going on beneath the surface. Research has tentatively shown that this is what we do physiologically, even if we’re not aware of it.
Mirror neurons are a type of neuron that fire off both when you perform an action, or see the same action being done by someone else. This causes you to feel the experience of the action yourself in a kind of second hand way. This applies not to just overt, defined actions like say eating a banana, but complex human experience that you witness. You can become aware of this link and so can feel into a connection with someone or a situation with many people — your brain quickly interprets their emotional situation and experience and you will literally experience a mirror of their state (albeit toned-down).
In cases where people have damage to their visual cortex — meaning they can’t adequately process input from their eyes to ‘see’ — they still respond emotionally to pictures of people showing particular emotions or expressions via processing done by their amygdala (termed affective blindsight). This means it’s isn’t a conscious process — you don’t just get sad because you know someone else is sad. You reflexively respond to cues from other people and are affected psychologically and emotionally.
Putting this into practice for experience design
Instead of just passively allowing ourselves to be impacted, we can take a conscious approach to sensing this input and using it to help give more emotional congruency to our interactions. A conscious approach to utilising this ability to empathise will help you get more out of research, manage facilitation sessions through feeling the sentiment of the room and communicate ‘felt’ experience with storytelling — bringing across the emotions, frustration through the medium of oral storytelling.
Feeling into Research
Rapport with human subjects
A good qualitative researcher needs to be able to quickly establish rapport and put people at ease — uneasy people make for poor research subjects. This means reading the state of others and hooking into that back and forth communication to find the right approach to dealing with any given particular person.
In any conversation between two people reading and responding of emotional and psychological state happens fluidly.
When two people sync up in this way body metrics align (blood pressure, emotions, brain state, etc) and when positive rapport is established people mirror body language naturally as a result. This subtle awareness is so fine-tuned that if this body language mirroring is faked, it doesn’t have same effect on sense of rapport. When participants in a study were asked to mirror on purpose in a conversation, the other participants had a sense of unease and distrust of the fake mirroring people, but couldn’t articulate why — they just sensed something was ‘off’.
I had an experience with an engineer where my initial attempts at establishing a comfortable flow and rapport just felt like a ship being dashed on the rocks. I was conducting contextual inquiry with a young engineer and was attempting to establish rapport — through emotional appeal, cajoling, friendliness & warmth — but as soon as I started I got totally blocked off. It felt like hitting a wall. This manifested as abrupt answering, questions were off beat, mis-timed, worded in a way that didn’t agree with the subject, and I could feel that the engineer was getting annoyed, frustrated, unsure. We just didn’t comfortably sync up.
My approach for rapport building was not suited to this person at all — emotional connection didn’t get through. He was very distanced from his emotions and had a very logical and rational mindset. My joviality and friendliness actually worked against me in this context and I felt it immediately. It took a bit of re-focussing to align with the participant — I had to feel into where he was coming from and understand his worldview and what language, priority, discussion was comfortable and ‘right’ for him. Once I started using the right language and taking cues from him the interaction smoothed over and I felt the conversation settle into a comfortable rhythm.
‘Feeling out’ Insights
Feeling insights comes from a combination of observed behavior, context of behavior and feeling into the emotion and motivation behind the behavior. This combination of factors gives an incredibly rich understanding and the light-bulb moment when you realize something valuable — i.e. insight. You understand why, in this context, a user behaves in a certain way and what opportunities there are or what the foundation of the problem is from a human perspective, and how to hook into this cultural/emotional/contextual situation.
To get these insights out in conversation you need to feel into the rhythm of conversation and flow, and the emotional state of participant — feel into what’s unsaid, where to probe, how to phrase things. This is the key benefit of qualitative research — the complexity of human experience. It means avoiding taking a literal interpretation of human actions or words — to read behind the actions, see what’s missing or hidden.
Bringing team members & stakeholders to research sessions — giving a felt understanding
Conducting research alone is a lot more time consuming than bringing members of your team with you. If you’re communicating your research findings via reports and documents you’re missing communicating the felt experience and combination of context, behavior, and feeling. Rather, readers will interpret the writing and outcomes through their own lens, and fill in gaps with assumptions.
Even if you want to communicate experience through telling stories, it’s hard as a solo agent to influence a team dynamic. It’s hard to shift the language, establish new concepts in an existing cultural group.
Instead, bring team members to research with you. Once they experience insights first hand they become active advocates for the stories.
Storytelling for conveying these ‘felt’ experiences
Oral storytelling isn’t like a presentation — it’s a two way exchange. The storyteller is constantly reading the audience and responding to their state — altering the story, adding flourishes, explaining further or changing direction depending on how the audience is responding.
When storytelling the experiences and insights you’ve witnessed, you can bring in elements from Method acting. Method acting involves calling up emotions to really feel them when you’re trying to portray a character in that state.
If you can channel the feelings and motivations you felt from research —as in, feel them yourself while telling the story — your audience will tap into this and also feel those emotions and start to develop a second-hand felt understanding.
I also avoid personas. Telling stories of real people rather than abstracting into aggregates is more compelling— it’s easier to story-tell the feelings or frustrations of a real person that you actually empathized with than make up an abstract aggregated story — and it’s easier for an audience to empathize with a real person than a fictional one.
Facilitating groups — feeling group sentiment
I sat in a facilitation session that turned into a train wreck — specifically because the facilitator ignored (or was blind to) all sentiment cues and was also presenting as unsure, anxious and nervous.
The premise of the session was flawed to begin with — the facilitator was asking the group to come up with user stories for some really poorly defined ‘personas’ that were basically a huge mash of unstructured post its left-over from the last workshop.
The group was so unsure about what they were supposed to do. Instead of immediately sensing this and finding another path forward, the facilitator ignored this and tried to force the activity. The group became more agitated and even angry. The facilitator began to reflect the anxiety of the situation — he became really nervous and was even sweating which further fed into this unpleasant feedback loop which devolved into arguments.
This is probably a worst-case scenario. It’s easy to avoid though — as soon as you start feeling uneasy, feel into the situation and you’ll quickly understand why.
Successfully managing a group of people through a set of activities to get an outcome is about synchronizing the group so that they’re attuned to you and the direction you set — like you’re the pied piper, except that it’s a two-way dance.
They follow your tune — you set the tone of the session and they interpret and respond — but then their response can also play into your emotional state. For example there may be some sentiment of skepticism, boredom, confusion, doubt which you need to manage and be aware of. If their doubt impacts you and you begin to feel and subtly communicate doubt then this can become a negative feedback loop that will impact the session. You need to be aware of the group sentiment and ensure you respond to it constructively, but always communicate stability and confidence.
The spectrum of feeling of a group varies. Participants won’t always feel comfortable or happy regarding the activities and this can be okay sometimes — but there’s a subtle though almost screamingly huge difference between a ‘slightly-unsure-but-following-your-lead’ feeling, and a ‘this-doesn’t-make-sense-I’m-disengaging/rebelling’ feeling. As a facilitator, it’s critical that you’re able to sense the difference.
An easy first sign is usually a feeling of discomfort, unease, or anxiety while running the session. Pay attention to these feelings and try to find out why you’re reflecting these feelings from the group.
Sometimes it’s something simple like that the activity isn’t clear —maybe the group need more clarification. It could also be a response to how you’re presenting your state. If you don’t have clarity and don’t present stability, the group will question your role and authority. Check how you’re communicating to group, how you’re presenting yourself and how you’re feeling about the session.
A lot of the science is detailed in Daniel Goleman’s book, Social Intelligence. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for further reading on this topic.
