Feeling a bit of Empathy

The first step within the design thinking process is empathy. (If you want to learn more about design thinking, check out my blog post here!)

Within this first stage of the process, designers are meant to get to know their audience, understand their needs and desires, and how they play into your project.

However, there is more than just one way to make this connection. I’ll tell you about some of my favorite empathy methods that you can employ in your next project.

Interviewing Users

One of the first and easiest ways to employ empathy is to just interview the users your project targets.

By first brainstorming a list of meaningful and insightful questions that you want to learn from your users, you can then set up a meeting where you can learn more about these issues firsthand.

When doing a meeting such as this one, you want to create an environment that is open and intimate. You want your user to be honest and open about their feelings so that you can gain a better understanding of the problems their facing.

This way you are more clearly aware of what your project should be addressing, and be able to look back on this interview to see if you’re solving what you set out to solve.

Analogous Empathy

Another strong method for gathering information is through analogous empathy.

Through this method, your team takes information about your users and their problems and starts to draw connections to other problems in other fields.

This is an excellent way for teams to ensure they are addressing a full range of issues, as often, there will be aspects overlooked in the initial research phase.

This method usually goes hand in hand with other empathy methods, such as interviewing or observing users, as you first gain initial knowledge from users you aim to address, then reinforce it through additional information found in other studies.

Personas

Creating user personas can also serve as an extremely effective way to address your project from the mindset of a user.

Personas are fictional users that your team creates based on the research gained. These personas will usually come as two to three (or even more) separate “users” that might use your project.

These help designers understand different methods of utilizing features within your project.

Let’s say that you are creating an app. Often, not everyone is going to use the app in the exact same way you are. Actually, more often than not they won’t. Not only are they not the designer or developer, but they might not understand technology in an equal way as you do, or have an entirely different goal when using the app.

This is why personas are so important, especially when doing user-experience design.

Observing Users

The next method I want to showcase is observing users.

While this may seem straightforward, observing real users gives you an inside look into how they are thinking, by using a real product or example to see where they have difficulties.

This is an excellent method, as it gives you a direct look into how the user interacts with other similar projects in the same or other fields, or in the test phase of design thinking, understand how users work to solve a problem or understand how they get held up.

Through this, you can more easily address problems that are directly affecting users and also get inside that is beyond what a user will directly tell you in an interview.

Conclusion

Though these are some of my favorite design thinking methods for empathy, there are plenty more as well from photo and video research, to empathy maps, all able to bring your project to the next level.

Once the empathy phase of the process is completed, it is then moved to the define stage, where a clear problem is set to be solved.