The importance of empathy

Excellent user experience designers have a great sense of empathy, which is essential, as well as the ability to see and understand things from the perspective of others. Empathy and compassion cannot be confused, you can not really agree or accept the views of others, but for their status must empathy, subjectively, as much as possible to understand their perspective of things. I believe empathy can make us a better designer:

Empathy can make it more natural for us to think about how to help users solve their practical problems, so that our design decisions can better focus on user goals.

Empathy can help us build better relationships with users, team members and stakeholders, providing an open, trusting and constructive foundation for human communication.

Empathy helps to shape the individual as a whole. This is not just a professional skill, but the same empathy that is being developed and dug up at work can be applied to other aspects of life.

Next I want to share with you some small ways to help us improve empathy in our daily work and life.

1. Find pain in daily life

Consciously focus on the people around you, including yourself, the inconveniences and even the pain that you experience in your daily life, for example, some colleagues spend half a day in a meeting, unable to reduce the height of the swivel chair or the tears of the couple at the airport. Focus on the object can even break the real social environment, you can try to the TV series or the role of the book to understand and experience.

Focus on these situations and try to understand how these people feel at the time, imagine what they expected and how they want to be helped. When this conscious attention turns into a subconscious habit of thinking, you will find yourself more natural in the actual product project to think about their goals and the problems they may face.

2. People in mind

When talking to others, try to put all your attention in the process of communication, which is especially important for the work of user interviews. When you put your body and mind into dialogue and communication, the other person can feel your attention, as a feedback to you, they are likely to provide more and more sincere and valuable conversation content.

3. Trailing observation

Whether this approach is appropriate also depends on the specific product type, and if possible, I suggest you "follow" the target audience and see how they use your product (or similar competing products) in real life. You can start with people around you and see how your friends or family are using the product in what context. If the other person is acceptable, try to draw on some of our practices in usability testing, such as putting forward simple tasks for them to complete and observing their operational performance during their use, and think of this as an informal real-life research or usability test.

4. Practical Experience

In the early stage of product design, if you want to know more about the user in the existing conditions is how to achieve the goal and solve the problem, then may wish to put himself into the actual environment and needs of the situation in person to try to realize the user's expectations, feel the whole process of the various problems faced. The cost of this approach is usually very low, and if you are careful enough, you can dig deeper and more directly to find a lot of valuable information, including the challenges the product will face in the actual situation, and so on.

Related reading: Mastering the brain-how to make the product experience more consistent with user psychology and behavioral rules

5. Finding common Ground

The study of "nurturing children's empathy" reveals that common interests and experiences help children better understand each other:

Experiments show that children are more likely to have empathy for those who have something in common with them. In addition, they are more likely to understand people who have the same unpleasant experiences as themselves.

Of course, we may not have to experience all kinds of negative experiences in user's life, however, in the process of user interviews or usability testing, you can try to actively seek and express the common ground between yourself and the user, such as hobbies, favorite teams, TV dramas and so on, to narrow the distance between the two sides, so that communication smoother, easier to understand each other.

6. Imitation expression

Studies have shown that mimicking other people's facial expressions can give you an understanding of the emotions associated with the person being imitated. This is an interesting little trick, if you want to truly experience and understand the other person's feelings in certain situations, you can try to imitate the other side of the expression you can observe, and experience the emotions you create in the process of imitation.

7. In-group review study

In the book of 2 Seconds, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the subject of physician-patient communication and demonstrates the important factor in deciding whether a physician will be prosecuted for improper treatment, namely, clinical attitudes.

Empathy plays an important role in the physician-patient relationship. The general practitioner who took part in the Bahrain Group (a discussion group that analyzes physician-patient relationships through psychoanalytic methods) has a deeper understanding of empathy. They will focus on understanding the feelings of the patient and develop a shared experience of the group members in a group meeting, and these common experiences can create a state in which these physicians have new cognitive and operational decisions for their patients.

Similarly, user research is a work that can be explored through group discussions and sharing. Team internal review research not only produces many experiences that are difficult to find in individual working conditions, but also enables them to form a common sense within the group and to give the team members a fuller understanding of the user.

8. Find a Mentor

People with a high degree of empathy can inspire you to be the same person, and this "mentor" can be another designer or researcher, as long as they are people you respect and who are willing to spend time together discussing projects and design issues. Even if Just eat or drink coffee together, as long as we can talk to each other for the user's understanding of the point of exchange.