As well documented as the power of empathy is, the ability of people to execute and consistently practice empathy is a challenge. This goes for any avenue of life, but especially in professional settings. In the age of social media, consumers are much more used to products that are designed to take advantage of our humanness rather than products designed with our wants, needs, and experiences in mind. 

To execute empathy in product design, a large amount of focus and detail has to go into the whole process. It starts with implementing empathy into research methods. According to Ale Wiecek, an empathy expert, the goal of empathetic research methods is “to gather enough information on the problems they are exploring, before making assumptions. It reinforces the importance of understanding a problem or experience from the customer/user’s perspective, rather than our own.” For designers, aligning your own understanding of the problem you are seeking to solve from the perspective of others and without assumption leads to great solutions

Empathy Research Methods

Personas:

This is a great methodology for a starting place or if designers do not have direct access to customers. A persona is a fictional character that is created to represent the different types of consumers who may use a particular product. Psychologist Jonathan Gruden on why personas are effective writes, “Data from psychological studies and artistic experience indicate that one naturally and generatively creates and engages with detailed representations of people. Personas bind into this powerful human capability. Most of the people do not naturally reason about extensive statistical summaries, but they do reason effortlessly about people, real or fictional.” (researchgate). It is critical that the personas are based on research for the design, however, outside of that, the development of these personas are up to the intuition of the designers. According to the Interaction Design Foundations, personas “make the design task at hand less complex, they will guide your ideation processes, and they will help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.” Although this isn’t necessarily as valuable as working directly with a customer, it requires very little resources, and still can provide strong insights. 

Journey Mapping:

According to Harry Brignull, “journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service.” (marvel app) This method is all about getting a detailed firsthand customer experience. Through this experience, designers can more easily identify pain points, validate assumptions about the customer or their experience, and predict future opportunities to improve the design. Typically, a journey map is recorded on a table. The horizontal axis will detail the experience through time. For example, if the product was soda, the horizontal axis would include everything from purchasing the soda, to how it opens, tasting it, and disposing of it. The vertical axis details analysis themes designers want to focus on. For example, these categories could be actions, questions, opportunities, pain points, enjoyable moments, etc. 

Love Letter/Breakup:

This is a great methodology to uncover the deep reasons why people connect or don’t connect with your design. This can be done by designers, stakeholders, or the customers themselves. It is a personal letter written directly to the product. Taking the time to reflect, write, and personify the product, can lead the writer the discover new things about their relationship with the product and reinforce what they already knew. 

Through implementing these empathy centric research methods, designers can help ensure that they are creating a product that is focused on directly addressing the needs, wants, and desires of customers.