The role empathy plays in design
Hello! Here’s your weekly deep dive into a topic that will help you lead better. Hope you enjoy the read and feel free to forward this along to a friend!
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About a decade ago, I was working on a prototype for a side project that I had poured many many hours into. I had gone through multiple iterations of the idea, thought through the end-to-end user flow and all its branches, and designed it to pixel perfection in Figma. Once I had a working prototype, I decided to start testing it with friends and family to be able to gather feedback. One afternoon, I put it in front of an acquaintance (Jason, friend of a friend) and let him play around with the app. One part of the onboarding required him to fill out some info before proceeding. I watched him go through the entire form and when he clicked ‘continue,’ he wasn’t able to proceed to the next screen. He kept going back to see what was wrong but couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t able to proceed. After four attempts, I hesitantly pointed out that there’s an error message around one of the form fields with the word ‘Required’ in red right below it.
Jason: “Oh! I completely missed that!”
Me: “No worries, what would make the error message stand out more?”
Jason: “Hmm…maybe adding an icon that tells me this is an error message?”
Me: “Yup, that makes sense. Does the error message being in bold red letters help?”
Jason: “Well, I’m colorblind so, for me the red isn’t very helpful. It didn’t stand out to me at all.”
It was fascinating to me that the only users that I had thought of designing for were users like me. In that moment, I felt both embarrassed and excited. Embarrassed because I felt like I could’ve done better and excited because this interaction had presented me with an opportunity to learn and grow. This is when I feel like I truly started cultivating a sense of empathy for users in various situations.
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Empathy vs Sympathy
I want to highlight this difference because I feel like many of us still get this wrong. I love the way Brené Brown describes empathy and how it differs from sympathy.
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What being customer-obsessed looks like
Knowing your users and being obsessed about their wants and needs are two very different things. As a designer/design leader, you can bring the rest of the team along for the ride and help them understand this dimension of product development — build something people want! Being customer/user obsessed can come in many forms. I’ve employed a few techniques over the years to get closer to user even when I’m not directly speaking with them on a regular basis.
Sit in on customer support calls or answer support tickets. When I first did this for a couple of days, it felt like a diving-into-the-deep-end experience, but it was one of the most rewarding. Nothing builds empathy more quickly and deeply than speaking with and being answerable to users who might be frustrated or confused about something you helped ship. It’s also a great lesson in patience! I would recommend repeating this exercise every quarter or every half for a couple of days each time.
Stay close to your UXR team. I’ve been fortunate enough to have built and worked in teams where research was an embedded function within Design, which made it a lot easier to be joined at the hip with my research peers. Have regular check-ins with them, request to be invited to user interviews where you can see first-hand how users are reacting to the latest prototype, make it a point to read shareouts with rich data that you won’t find anywhere else. Prioritizing these touchpoints with your UXR partners will help you build stronger bridges between the team and your users.
Marry quant and qual. In an effort to be data-informed in product development, it’s usually a good idea to have the full picture. Relying on qual studies only can give you false positives. When a cohort of users tells you that they’d use a feature in a certain way, try to validate or invalidate this by observing what they actually do. This will help you and your team get a better understanding of your users’ wants and actual behaviors.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. How do you think about cultivating empathy for your target user base?
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Three things that caught my eye this week:
🟣 How beautiful are these gradient coasters?!
👀 A few incredible examples of what Sora by OpenAI can do
👉 A gem from 6 years ago: Henry Modisett’s great write-up on User Empathy
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Until next time! 👋