Practicing empathy: 20 pointers to keep in mind as you journey through human centered design
Human centered design. These words and the open nature of HCD practice mean that it is open to interpretation and variability, yet the focus on humanity is indisputable. As we all move towards a higher vibration, we are putting people first as we design the future. Our common calling is to evolve human understanding, to take every opportunity to design better for the people we serve.
As a passionate HCD practitioner, I am conscious of the potential shortcomings and trade-offs in process versus outcome and the responsibility to bring it back to the human experience, every day. The stakes are always high, no matter the situation or scale, and I feel it in the pit of my stomach when what we do falls short.
Being “live” in the middle of a project, I can’t help but reflect on how I practice empathy in design. Human centered design means empathising with people and designing for people, keeping our focus on people throughout. It is not just one stage of design thinking, it is a mindset and practice that we carry through the whole process.
Empathy is when you can feel what another person is feeling. Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process; by deeply understanding people we are able to better design for them. - Hasso Plattner Design Institute
Whether we are at the front end, discovering and defining, or in the back end of the process, solutioning and refining, empathy helps us ultimately deliver outcomes that make life better for people. Sometimes we may get lost in the process, or we might be in a hurry to introduce our ideas and solutions. We may miss the moments that reveal more discoveries and connections, deepening our understanding of the whole, complex human experience.
I have reflected on the good, the bad and the transformative moments I’ve been fortunate to experience. I’ve contemplated empathy-woven design stories, like the one shared by the Embrace team. The Embrace infant warmer was developed focusing on the people who would use the warmer, in their environment, and has lead to a solution that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
From these reflections, I’ve catalogued principles that I feel are anchoring as empathy behaviours through the process and practice of design thinking.
Empathise: Be with people where they are.
1. Consider the full spectrum of people, looking specifically into minorities and “outliers” that may have different perspectives, abilities and needs.
2. Solicit inputs from people in a way that works for them. Some people will find it easier to connect online, for others technology may be a barrier. Get as close to the natural or real everyday experience as possible.
3. Empower and invite people to share their experiences, in their role as experts of their lives and experiences.
4. Slow down enough to see and feel things differently. Suspend judgement, feel a connection to the person. Be a learner, and embrace another person’s perspective and experience. That may involve trying (experiencing it), observing and or asking.
5. Look for the complete context. We can look at tasks, but also beyond that - to understand why. Frameworks like AEIOU (Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users) remind us to explore widely and see inter-relationships.
Empathy is not walking in another’s shoes. First, you must remove your own. - Scott Cook, Founder Intuit
Define: Make sense of the nature and scale of the problem from the person’s perspective.
6. Understand what the person is looking to accomplish. Reveal the connection between the obvious or surface level details, and deeper, profound drivers. Ensure clarity on how big the scale of the human problem to be solved actually is. Jobs to be done thinking helps here, particularly the idea of four levels of job conveyed by Jim Kalbach in The Jobs to be done playbook. Jobs can be abstracted to micro, small, big and aspirational jobs.
7. Document and convey the entire situation and context for the person and the problem. Use storytelling and visualisation to share what has been learned and what is needed, as a powerful way to engage the team in the essence of the human. This may involve not just diagrams like experience maps and atlases, but also video and photographic artefacts of the people and their lives.
8. Be careful not to categorise and label different types of people in a way that implies that the representation of a person is fixed or absolute. There is always more, and always change.
9. Clarify if a phenomenon is specific or widespread and be clear on the extent to which the problem definition is inclusive. Specifically, is the intent to address different types of needs with variability, or is it to address an average (which may result in some measure of exclusion)?
Ideate: Spark ideas from fresh thinking with human potential as the north star.
10. Springboard from human stories, bringing forth the vivid, emotionally compelling and real (not made up!) truths to inspire individual and team idea generation.
11. Include techniques for ideation that keep the human need and experience at the forefront, like storyboarding.
12. Include approaches that involve co-design and generative design with people (for example card sorting, or projective methods and creative tool kits), drilling down on details and specific elements.
Prototype: Make the functional and emotional experience as close to reality as possible.
13. When exposing people to prototypes that bring ideas to life, use techniques that keep it real and interactive such as role-play or simulation. If only remote options can be used for prototyping, use video movies or capture experience on video. Visual and as close to reality as possible are key. How the person will experience it.
14. When developing and sharing the prototype with people, keep in mind the functional usability aspects that make tasks and activities achievable, and the emotional qualities (the feel)
15. Stay focused on the challenges that people are experiencing in achieving their goal, using multiple rounds of prototyping to keep getting to better.
Test: Resist the temptation to build, embrace relearning.
16. Ensure that a variety of voices are involved in testing. If the same group of voices are involved all the way through, there is a risk of everything being agreeable, part of the Ikea effect or Made here bias.
17. Being prepared to be “public” and open to being challenged is needed at this point. Conducting testing in context with the people it is intended for enables real world, powerful feedback.
18. Actively look for what is wrong and what is flawed. This is the time to catch the mismatches and pinpoint the refinements that get the experience working for people.
19. Keep an eye open to what is resonating and connecting with people. Why is it so, what can be learned from that and potentially amplified?
20. Consider the solution and how the customer experiences it against the outcomes that are desired. Has the experience enabled the person to progress towards what they are seeking to accomplish?
“who makes it” is often vastly different from “who uses it”
The interactions I am involved in designing and delivering have to make people’s lives better. It’s as simple, and as challenging, as that. And it is always challenging!
To borrow from Kat Holmes, in experience design “who makes it” is often vastly different from “who uses it”. Empathy combined with curiosity help us to avoid making assumptions and continuously evolve towards a better outcome for the people we serve.