Empathy in UX/UI Design

Empathy is the ability designers gain from research to understand users’ problems, needs and desires fully so that they can design the best solutions for users. Designers strive for empathy by deeply probing users’ worlds, to define their precise problems and then to ideate towards solutions that improve users’ lives.

“What makes us human is what is delightful.”

— Genevieve Bell, Anthropologist noted for cultural-practice-and-technological-development work

See why empathy is absolutely vital in design.

Empathy – The Glow You Put in Your Users’ and Customers’ Hearts

To understand your users/customers fully, you must see and feel their worlds from their perspective. And to access these core vantage points, you’ll first need the right research methods. You want to gather reliable information from which you can distill your users’ essences, as personas, to take forward in your design process. In user-centered design, user experience (UX) design and elsewhere, you need empathy. It even has a themed stage in the design thinking process: Empathize.

Your biggest challenge is to dig deep into your users’/customers’ subconscious; they can’t fully explain their precise needs. Designing for the human world is tricky, especially when users/customers access brands across many touchpoints and channels (e.g., online). In service design, ethnography is key to understanding their habits, motivations, pain points, values and whatever else influences what they think, feel, say and do on their user journeys. In ethnographic field studies, you observe what these users/customers do. Four methods are:

• Shadowing – following users/customers around to get a day-in-the-life-of feel of what they experience.

• Unstructured/Semi-structured Interviews – exploring hard-to-reach areas of their behavior in a naturalistic atmosphere, not systematically questioning them. This “hanging out” with them yields more honest, accurate insights. It’s usually better to conduct semi-structured interviews, strung loosely around an “areas-to-cover” framework in a discussion guide.

• Diary Studies – letting users self-report. As with surveys, you rely on users to record things for you. Unlike surveys, diary studies help to capture “after-effects” over (typically) a 1-to-2-week period. Note: diary studies alone can’t reveal pain points effectively; they’re best combined with interviews.

• Video Ethnography – video-recording enough material of participants in their environment as users/customers to gather insights about them.

How to Discover What Users Really Want

It’s best to remain informal and open-minded.

1. Here’s what to consider for an ethnographic study where you directly observe users interacting with a service (e.g., booking short-stay accommodation):

• Introduction – Thank them and briefly explain your research’s purpose.

• Context – Look around and note your users’ surroundings.

• Note/observe/ask – Encourage them to continue their activities as though you weren’t there, letting you observe and ask as few questions as possible. When you do ask questions, ensure they’re open-ended and encourage more observations (e.g., “How?”).

• Touchpoints  & Channels – Pay attention to the touchpoints and service channels your users interact with (e.g., paying for room/property bookings by phone). 

• Tools – Note which tools these customers use throughout their journey.

• Familiarity with Domain/Task – Note how comfortable they are with the various tools and tasks they use/perform.

• Service Artifacts – Pay attention to the artifacts that are important throughout the service experience between the customers’ various touchpoints:

  • Physical items

  • Cognitive constructs (e.g., the customer’s changing understanding of the steps involved)

  • Social or emotional elements (e.g., hunting for a lockbox in an unfamiliar street)

• Disconnects – Notice these, which happen anytime customers experience a problem with the service (e.g., they can’t access the accommodation/property).

• Needed ecosystem support – Watch for the points in the service where support from the backstage of the service is needed (e.g., the service-providing organization/agency must contact the landlord if the customer can’t).

• Wrap-up – Thank them at the end of the session and answer any relevant questions they have.

2. For Semi-structured interviews, order and ask your questions properly, stringing them loosely in a discussion guide featuring the following types of questions:

• Introductory – e.g., “What was it like the last time you…?”

• Follow-up – on what they’ve just said.

• Probing – ask them to give an example/explain something.

• Specifying – if their descriptions are too general.

• Direct – to introduce topics, etc.

• Indirect – if you sense a direct question might lead the user, etc. 

• Structuring – to get back on-topic, etc.

• Interpreting – to confirm you’ve understood the previous answer correctly.

Also, let silence help the user/customer give you honest, unpressured answers.

From your findings, you can now create personas, empathy maps and user journey maps (image below) / customer journey maps.  

Tips

• Service safaris are a great way to go into the field to see what users experience.

• Brainstorming with your team can help reveal the right, open-ended questions to ask users.

• Engage with extreme users – If you can find and interview users who face greater challenges, you’ll find the full scope of problems which all users can encounter.

• Find effective analogies to draw parallels between users’ problems and problems in other fields, to find further insights.

• Bodystorming – Wearing equipment gives you first-hand experience of what your users encounter in their environment (e.g., goggles to simulate vision problems).

Overall, remember: what users/customers do and what they say they do are two different things.

Learn More about Empathy

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