An Empathetic Designer
#53: On the importance of empathy in our work and ways to cultivate it within ourselves
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An Empathetic Designer
Around a year ago, I asked my LinkedIn network what they think is the most important skill of a product designer. Surprisingly, it wasn’t empathy–it was problem-solving.
I still believe it’s one of the most crucial skills we designers need to have and should try to develop. In short, empathy is the ability to understand and share another person's feelings, thoughts, or experiences. It involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, imagining how they feel, and responding with care and understanding.
Empathy and product designs are usually associated with:
User research: Designers use empathy to better understand the root cause of the user’s pain point, how they feel, and how they behave.
Ideation: Designers use empathy to imagine how users would operate the product so that there’s less friction and more joy in completing tasks.
Empathy helps us do our jobs on so many levels. If you think of an empathetic designer, you probably see someone trying to imagine how another person would use the product that they have designed. While this is valid, empathy amplifies our efforts in many more phases of our design processes, such as user research, stakeholder management, and even planning internal processes in our design teams.
In today’s article, I’ll cover some usual and slightly more unusual situations from my career where my empathy helped me do my job well. I'll also include a few tips on how you can cultivate empathy in yourself.
Internal processes
At the beginning of this year, my team faced an enormous challenge. The previous product teams have been reorganized and split into smaller ones, making developing one of our core platforms more complex from a product design perspective.
The projection of the incoming workload for this year wasn’t very promising. Instead, it gave me a signal that I might need more resources in the design team. As hiring isn’t that simple, I first wanted to prepare for the eventual hit of the extensive workload (which hasn’t happened so far), so I decided to give our new smaller teams some tools for super early ideation of their ideas before they would come to my team with requests. In other words, I gave more responsibilities (or I’d rather say more capabilities) to non-designers in the product design process.
While some might find this strange, I believe including non-designers in the design process is vital to keeping the ideas fresh and the team involved. That’s why I decided to invest some time in the first quarter and build a very simple library of common components that the platform is built from and give it to non-designers so they could iterate on their ideas faster through rapid prototyping.
How would non-designers use Figma?
That was the main question I had to answer. I was thinking about it and tried to wear the shoes of someone who had never used Figma before through the entire process of building this library of components.
Being an empathetic designer helped me to come up with a couple of solutions that enabled non-designers to kickstart their work with Figma and the library of components:
The idea was to give them building blocks that they could use like LEGOs to assemble their prototypes. The file was well structured, all the components were named correctly, and well documented. Components were also put in context, so it was easier to grasp the idea of using them.
All the basic components from our design system have been linked, listed, and documented within this file. If someone felt adventurous, they were able to go further and build more complex prototypes using just the design system components.
The first page of the file was an introduction and quite detailed instructions on how to get started with Figma and the file itself. Also, my team has recorded a few video tutorials explaining how to use it.
We have set up a Slack channel for everyone who wants to start using the library, ask questions, or share feedback with us.
The teams have recently started using the library, and the first reactions are very positive. I was initially planning to run a few Figma workshops, but apparently there’s no need to. Empathy was quite helpful in foreseeing the most common use cases and designing the library specifically for them.
Understanding users
When I joined my current company, I was assigned to a work on a GIS platform used by our employees. I never worked on a GIS platform before, and my geospatial knowledge was quite limited at that time. Thanks to the fact that the platform was internal, I was able to do proper research to understand my users better. Empathy was a key factor in enabling this.
The piece of software I was hired to work on was already operational, but it wasn’t in the best shape. Plus, there was no PM on that team back then. The first thing I did was meet with almost every user for a one-to-one session to say hello, introduce myself, and discuss the current state of the platform. I’ve met with at least a dozen users.
As the next step, I asked a few users if I could shadow them for a day to see what they do and better understand their daily duties, struggles, and pain points. It gave me so many insights to bring in a few initiatives that were a great hit, and my users loved them!
But I didn’t stop there. I was listening to them. Not only during the regular user interviews, but also on team-building activities and company events. I was there to act as a therapist, listening to how much debt is in the current workflow and thinking about how the platform I built could address it. I gathered information no one would ever tell me during regular user research sessions. Because I was a good listener, they trusted me and told me things they wouldn’t share with other team members.
I realize that this scenario is very specific and most likely impossible to reproduce in most cases, but there are a few things you can implement in your work to better understand your users.
Tips on cultivating empathy
I’m pretty sure you’ve got a lot of empathy in yourself already as a designer (unless you were clinically diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, so you are most likely not a designer anyway).
Still, there’s always room for improvement. Here’s the list of things you can try out to become a more empathetic product designer:
Active listening.
Ethnographic user research.
Journey mapping.
Let’s explore each tip in more detail.
Active listening
Being an active listener means being a good listener. This essentially leads to being a good and empathetic designer who is curious primarily about the user’s needs, but not just that. Curiosity is a true trait of great designers. If you feel that you are not the best listener, don’t worry, great listeners are made, not born.
Kate Murphy, in her book “You’re Not Listening”, highlights that active listening requires conscious effort, such as asking clarifying questions, managing distractions, and reflecting on conversations afterward.
A genuine desire to understand others, rooted in curiosity, forms the basis of meaningful listening. Instead of listening with the goal of responding or steering the conversation, Murphy emphasizes starting with curiosity about what the other person is saying and why.
This is exactly what we, as designers, should be doing during user research. I strongly recommend reading this book if you want to get better at active listening.
Etnographic user research
Spending time in users’ environments and observing their behaviors in context is a powerful way to uncover unspoken needs and challenges. Shadowing users, performing the same activities they do, or even simulating their experiences (such as using accessibility tools or wearing impairment simulators) is something you can try out, especially in enterprise scenarios.
What I did in my first couple of weeks after joining my current organization was exactly this. I shadowed my users to empathize with them deeper and understand what are their struggles. This allowed me to design something that actually addressed their needs.
Journey mapping
Journey map is a fantastic tool that helps visualize the steps users take to achieve a certain goal highlighting their emotions, pain points, and moments of delight or frustration. This helps us identify opportunities for improvement and empathize with the entire user experience, not just isolated interactions.
While this sounds quite obvious for many designers, I know not everyone is doing those exercises. I think they are wasting so much opportunity to identify gaps in the experience and plan improvements accordingly.
Some may be hesitant, as journey mapping is usually not a one-man job. It requires to wear a hat of a detective, interview various people from inside and outside of organization, and in general is quite time consuming. But the results are worth the effort as they might be useful not only for the design, but other departments too. I know some teams use customer journey maps during the onboarding of newjoiners.