Empathy in UX Design
What are your user’s pain points? What are their goals? What do they want?
As a UX designer, you are the voice of your users. The decisions you make must reflect the user and their experience. Empathizing with your users will allow better design decisions from you or anyone else in the design process.
Empathy, in UX, isn’t feeling how people feel or adapt their lifestyle and everything that comes with it. Empathy in design is merely taking the time to carry out user research and use the findings to guide your decision-making processes. Once we have established the user’s needs, we can develop new problem-solving approaches that accommodate the users’ constraints and tailor the product to their explicit and implicit needs.
Referencing the image above imagine, as the designer, you are the mother in the photo. You are designing a product for the little girl to use. Are you making sure to see the world from this little girls perspective? Alternatively, are you, the mother with your own problems, concerns, and outlook, making design decisions assuming it is best for the little girl?
Sympathy vs Empathy
The word sympathy is most commonly used to mean – feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. Sympathy is associated with caring and a desire to see the situation of others improve, but it doesn’t enable us to create meaningful connections with others. Sympathy alone will likely result in a solution we think is a great idea but which doesn’t provide any benefit to the user.
Empathy enables us to understand the whole view of users and their experience, creative solutions that fix the correct problems, not just surface issues. Without empathy, we cannot fully understand the problems users might be facing concerning our product.
Why Research is Important
For a variety of reasons, you may not get all of the details when speaking with people. They may withhold information out of fear, distrust or some other inhibiting factor such as lack of articulation. As designers, we need to develop intuition, and imagination to dig deeper, to extract the right kinds of insight to make a more meaningful difference without getting too personal.
The Take-Away
Empathy is essential for us as designers and particularly for design thinkers because it allows us to truly understand and uncover the latent needs and emotions of users.