Role Of Empathy In (Human -Centric) Design.

Human Centricity is all about keeping the end users, presumably humans, at the center of every thought during the design process. It starts with empathy towards the end-user and how the user is going to use a designed solution (a product or a service), what hurdles may come in the way of smooth usage and most importantly, will the user be able to achieve the end goal.

Consider you are a part of multi-disciplinary design team that has received a brief on designing a process flow for elderly people in the retail bank branches. All of you are below age of 40 and thus none of you belong to the intended user group. How will you approach designing this flow in that case.

Empathy plays critical role in almost all the stages of design. It is specially critical at the observation stage of observing the users and coming up with right problem statements to solve for.

McDonagh (2006) [1] defines empathy as ‘the intuitive ability to identify with other people’s thoughts and feelings – their motivations, emotional and mental models, values, priorities, preferences, and inner conflicts’.

To empathise with the end users of a product or a service requires looking at the usage of products and services from the eyes of the users. It is about understanding the expressed and implicit needs of the users in using the products and services to achieve a goal.

In the case of above problem statement, since you do not belong to the user group, the best way to observe and understand users in the environment of a bank branch. There are two stages in which this can be done. First is a passive observation and looking at the users in the elderly group from a distance. Observing how they navigate through the current flow of process right after they enter the bank branch. Observing the difficulties they may face while trying to understand which documents to fill. Observe difficulties in holding the pen or navigating through a digital interface.

Second stage is an active participation in the whole process by accompanying someone you know to the bank branch of volunteering to help out someone in the bank. In this way, you will actually go through all the steps and will be able to clearly understand the challenges faced by elderly people in any bank process.

Empathy is all about developing an instrumental understanding of the feelings, thoughts, needs, desires, capabilities and tendencies of making mistakes of the end users.

Empathy also comes to be important at the prototyping and iteration stage of solutions design. When you create prototypes, you have to replicate the real world usages from the perspective of end user. You test out the prototypes with users for a deeper observation of understanding whether your prototype helps the users achieve the desired goal or not. If you empathise greatly with the end users, you will deliberately make efforts to leave out all the assumptions in the solution design about the end user and decrease the probabilities of making mistakes and each step of the solution usage.

Stepping into the experience of the user and stepping out to formulate the problem statement correctly and finding the right design parameters is key to a more user centric design. The stepping in is needed for deep understanding, the stepping back for competent action [2].

As per Kouprie, Merlijn & Sleeswijk Visser, Froukje. (2009),, empathy has two components namely a affective and cognitive. Affective component is about ‘resonating emotion’ and cognitive component is about 'resonating perspective'. In my view, during the process of empathising with the user a designer must make sincere attempt to look at the product and environment in which it is used from user's perspective. One must imagine themselves to be the user. In doing so one must try to feel what the end user is feeling when the user is in action of using the product or service.

Components of Empathy by Kouprie, Merlijn & Sleeswijk Visser, Froukje. (2009) [2].

Kouprie, Merlijn & Sleeswijk Visser, Froukje. (2009) [2], have also proposed a framework for integrating empathy in design practice. It is based on the principle that a designer steps into the life of the user, wanders around for a while and then steps out of the life of the user with a deeper understanding of this user.

These phases are

(1) discovery,

(2) immersion,

(3) connection and

(4) detachment

If you look at the example of designing a process flow for elderly people in the retail bank branches, you can see the application of these phases. Discovery, Immersion, and Connection are related to the act of observing the elderly users in the bank branch environment and detachment is related to stepping out of this environment and create an actionable framework for approaching the design solution in this context.

One important factor in empathic approach is deep investment of time especially in observation stage. If you cannot take time to observe elderly users in an actual bank branch and to look at their specific needs, steps they follow to navigate through branch, and actually yourself become a user for some time, you may not fully understand what inputs to give in your design for the desired output.

I will also discuss empathy in relation to 'suspended judgement' in future.

Best

VM

[1] Thomas J, McDonagh D. Empathic Design: Research strategies. AMJ 2013, 6, 1, 1-6. http//dx.doi.org/10.4066/AMJ.2013.1575

[2] Kouprie, Merlijn & Sleeswijk Visser, Froukje. (2009). A framework for empathy in design: stepping into and out of the user's life. Journal of Engineering Design. 20. 437-448. 10.1080/09544820902875033.