How designers empathize
As designers, we speak for the people who do not know the language.
This is something I once heard a professor say while I was only a timid freshman learning about what being a designer truly meant. The professor said the unspoken goal of a graphic designer is to solve a problem or tell a story for someone who cannot do it on their own. With this logic, it’s safe to consider designers as heroes, peacemakers, and even problem solvers.
However, the journey to becoming this hero doesn’t begin in a sketchbook or on an Adobe program as many may believe. The journey begins outside, within your surroundings.
Empathy
Mostly all designers follow the design thinking process which aims to provide a consistent guide to create powerful and efficient designs. The first step in this process is called empathy. In an everyday sense, empathy means seeing the world through other people’s points of view and holding compassion for them because of that. In design, it means the same thing, only applied to a different context. It’s important to do research to understand where your audience/clients are coming from in design so that you can level with their experience. Leveling with their experience and understanding where they’re coming from will help you create meaningful and helpful designs.
There are a few ways that designers practice empathy research.
What/How/Why Method
For this method, picture this: you’re sitting in a place you don’t know much about and you’re observing the user. You’re observing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and even why they’re doing it the way they are.
Once these observations are made, this allows the designer time to analyze the findings. You can now create hypothesis’s and even begin identifying some problems.
2. Contextual Interviews
The second approach designers can use is to conduct human-centered interviews where the observations would take place. This means that if you’re trying to observe how a person uses an ATM, you’ll conduct an interview inside the bank, or wherever that ATM is. This is useful because contextual interviews allow the designer to feel out the type of environment the users are in when they’re doing the “thing” that you’re observing. Plus, being able to ask questions is a huge plus. This gives users a chance to voice their struggles or frustrations with the product directly to you, giving you clear problem statements to work with.
3. Love Letter/Breakup Information
The last approach that sticks out to me is one that is much more creative and imaginative than the others. This idea is a personal love letter written to the product that you’re looking to redesign. According to the Medium, the thought behind this is that when people write love letters, they often do a good job of not only expressing what they love but also why they love it. This is helpful for designers because they can see what is working. Additionally, love letters can also be turned into breakup letters. These letters serve the opposite purpose or informing designers what wasn’t working with the product. This fun approach can be used for nearly all products and provide more insight into product-use than simple observations could.
While there are plenty more empathy research methods, these are some that are the most beneficial to designers. Therefore, the next time you’re looking to put yourself into someone else’s shoes, consider these strategies, as they will bring you one step closer to your goal.