Design through empathy
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This document discusses the importance of empathy in design. It provides tips for developing empathy including listening without judgment, understanding other perspectives, creating accurate user personas, prioritizing terminology, and applying empathy throughout the design process, such as in prototyping, participatory design, and validation. The goal is to understand users in order to better support them and create prototypes guided by empathy.
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Design through empathy
- 2. Infragistics Propietary2 Design through empathy
- 3. Infragistics Propietary3 Stefan Ivanov Sr. UX Architect at Local leader of Course instructor of Crash course in
- 7. Infragistics Propietary7 Empathy To understand how another person thinks, reasons, what their guiding principles are and how they react to different situations. Understand your users to support them better!
- 8. Infragistics Propietary8 Listening Shut your mouth Shut your critical brain Absorb, understand, take the perspective
- 9. Infragistics Propietary9 …at the end you will have enough understanding to create accurate personas and user scenarios
- 10. Infragistics Propietary10 Sieving the sand Leave some time to pass Listen again Similarities, differences, patterns
- 11. Infragistics Propietary11 …at the end you will be able to properly prioritize and outline the terminology – critical for UI
- 12. Infragistics Propietary12 Applying it To anything In prototyping Through participatory design In validation by experts or users
- 13. Infragistics Propietary13 …at the end you may create your own set of guidelines to drive the creation of prototypes
- 14. Infragistics Propietary14 …and if you work in a team have your prototypes reviewed by a colleague guided by a similar KPI list
- 15. Infragistics Propietary15 Ideas & PeopleIdeas Think Create Validate Listen Deepen Apply
- 16. Infragistics Propietary16 hope you liked my recipe for building and applying empathy
Editor's Notes
- So I promised to tell you more about empathy and how we can use it in a design process.
- My name is Stefan and I am very happy to have the opportunity to tell you more about this today. I currently work as the Senior UX Architect at Infragistics Bulgaria - a diamond partner of SoftUni. I also serve as the local leader of the Interaction Design Foundation, which is a worldwide community of UX and Interaction Designers. And last but not least I will be one of the instructors of Crash course in UX organized by SoftUni in cooperation with Infragistics and HYPE in about ten days. If you didn’t sign up for this free course yet hurry up while there are still spots available.
- I want to briefly walk you through a UX process using the overview of our upcoming course because my talk today refers to different stages of this process but instead of teaching and describing them, I will use my short while to give you an idea of how to do them better through empathy. So in the course of my talk I will refer to discovery when we talk to potential users to get better understanding of the project and context. I will refer to personas and user scenarios that are important part of the research but during our course we will take a deeper dive into dose and build on top of them with user journeys. We will refer to the design phase and the creation of prototypes and layouts but in general but if you want to know more about the various types of prototypes and the specific techniques for creation of each I will have to disappoint you today. And we will also have a quick reference to validating our work but again only scratching the surface of this UXD activity.
- Everyone has a (slightly) different understanding of what empathy is. Actually if I ask each of you for your own definition of empathy I will get answers that differ not only in their wording but also in their meaning. So let us first align together around a common understanding of the concept of empathy. Empathy is neither sympathy, nor compassion. Sympathy is pretty much sharing the feeling, no matter it is the joy from a live concert or the sorrow for your team losing the game, it is like being tuned to the surrounding emotional vibes. And compassion is pretty much feeling sorry for somebody, just because you see them sad and you care for them – it is like being sad for seeing someone who is sad but if they are happy you will be happy too without being affected by the actual reason for the emotional state of the other person.
- Empathy does not simply happen without any effort as it is for the other two. You have to consciously develop empathy for the user and the particular scenario!
- The empathy we are interested in can be expressed through the understanding of how others think, reason, what their guiding principles are and how the react in different situations. It is about knowing your users in their context as well as your best friends in life. Such understanding allows you to truly support them better with the solution you are creating. Enough about empathy, let’s see a few tips about developing it.
- First comes listening and yes it is simple to hear somebody, but it is pretty hard to listen to them, especially if you do not fully agree. However, your opinion here does not matter, worse it actually hurts and the first thing to learn is to shut your mouth. Disagreeing with people discourages them to keep on sharing and the more information you get, the better. The next and much harder step is to shut your disagreeing brain, meaning that you stop listening selectively and start to attend to all irrelevant of your personal opinion. Our ultimate goal here is that through listening, we are able to ABSORB and UNDERSTAND as much of the information being shared with us as possible without using our critical thinking in order to be able to TAKE THE PERSPECTIVE.
- The better listener you teach yourself to become the more exact understanding you will have, and therefore the more accurate your personas and user stories will be. This gives you a better start in the design process. Now that you have the pole position let’s see how you can build on top of it.
- You need to sieve the sand and this time you have some freedom of choice but the steps are pretty much fixed. On one hand you can record your conversations and strictly follow the recipe by listening to your recordings over and over again to filter the data and discover the information. On the other you can every human’s natural brain skill – the memory half-life – because after a certain period of time half of what was heard would not be remembered anymore. Bear in mind that the second approach is more error prone than the first one, but requires no additional overhead like getting consent for the recordings and so on.
- The more you sieve the higher confidence you have that your discoveries are significant, but even if you do so just a few times the overall pictures is much clearer. And out of this sieving you can easily extract the terminology for different objects, actions and process. There is no need to be creative for your menu items or button labels later on – you already have the correct answer. And instead of talking about things like files, folders and directories you will be telling a story about songs, genres and playlists.
- Actually you can apply empathy to anything you make because it gives you better and more accurate insight about you product and target user group. However, I find it most beneficial when we apply empathy to the design process and the creation of various prototypes. There are even extremities like participatory design, a process where you add a target user to your design team and keep him involved throughout the design, which implicitly builds your empathy. But it is also useful to apply empathy when validating your work. If you have build it already you do an expert validation as you confidently walk in your user’s shoes but bear in mind that it makes no sense to validate your own prototypes. And if you are determined to do user test bring your desire to build empathy along, as it is guaranteed that there will be frustration and you really need to emphasize hard to manage to get to the source of that frustration.
- A practical tip would be to use your established empathy for the creation of a set of guidelines well ahead of the prototyping phase and make sure that you stay aligned to those guidelines when creating the prototypes of your choice.
- And of course, another tip would be to define a similar list of KPIs built upon your established empathy, again well ahead of the prototype creation, and use those KPIs with your colleagues, performing expert reviews on your work.
- And one last thing… As we know great ideas require careful research and thinking over, a skilled craftsman to embody the concept in a material deliverable, and a trained appraiser to create a validation strategy and evaluate the outcome. But UX is all about the people and without a user there is no experience to think of, so an additional set of skills is necessary. The listening and understanding without questioning, the sieving of the sand to uncover the tiny precious bits of preciousness and the application of it throughout the creation and validation of embodiments of the idea.
- I really hope that you liked my recipe for building and applying empathy and if you really want to get the practical know-hows for the process I look forward to see you at SoftUni next month!
- Now it’s your turn to speak out any questions that you might have, thank you!