People Are at the Center of Everything, so Make Sure They Are
The central tenet of human-centered design is that everything starts and ends with understanding people. This idea gives fuel and direction to a solution that is tailored to the audience; the people the organization impact every day – customers, employees, vendors, friends and even foes. Even though the “stages” of the design thinking framework are not linear, the starting point for everything is understanding people. And to understand people you need to empathize with them – it’s the only way. You must have a system of principles that enriches the understanding of and empathy with people, first-and-foremost.
"Design starts with empathy, establishing a deep understanding of those we are designing for.” - Jeanne Lied, professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business
Understanding empathy is so much more than user feedback from a survey and a user experience (UX) check list. Empathy provides critical insight into users’ emotions and emotional states and surfaces the opportunity to identify with them as an individual. The understanding of empathy should not be limited solely to designers but should be imbued into all aspects of interactions from face-to face to digital channels and across all functional aspects of an organization.
There are numerous effective tools that help bring empathy to light to enrich the user experience and ultimately create better outcomes for organizations.
The most common tool is persona development, which provides a constant, documented benchmark of who is being designed for that overlays the numerous ways in which an organization interacts with its customers, employees and other stakeholders. A persona is a method of breaking your users into groups that share common traits.
There are many useful techniques in the development of persona development:
- ROLE PLAYING - Role playing allows you to empathize with others through storytelling. It helps highlight the needs of the user by imagining “yourself in her shoes,” and thinking how she might think and feel in various situations and circumstances.
- DIRECT OBSERVATION - Direct observation allows you to witness and experience behaviors and interactions in a real time environment. We have a natural, humanistic reaction when we observe someone’s struggle or pain. We subconsciously identify the problem, define it, and look for a solution. The best kind of natural problem solving. Observation is a natural way to inspire new ideas and solutions.
- DIRECT COMMUNICATION - Direct communication is not to be forgotten in empathy. In certain situations, it may be more important than observation. Direct communication leverages active listening techniques to unmask pain or frustration beyond the surface “I want X” statements that are so often mistaken as the source of the pain or frustration. When someone says “I want” they may not know if that “want” actually solves their issue. The goal of active listening is to get to the need – the source or kernel of what is driving the “I want.” When you listen beyond “I want” you start to hear all the reasons contributing to a pain and consider the actual need. Don’t confuse the symptom for the ailment.
Without empathy, it is impossible to create a long-lasting solution where you are treating the underlying cause and not the symptoms. It doesn’t matter if your organization is solving deep-rooted social issues, building a logistics system, re-thinking your internal organization structure, running a hospital, building the next great software application or creating an overarching company strategy to crush your competition. Design thinking and human-centered design are always about empathy and how to use a deep understanding of empathy to design solutions that solve the REAL problem and not the symptom of the problem.
Putting the Design Thinking Puzzle Together:
Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns,
to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols.
Tim Brown
Change by Design