Empathic Design: Human-Centered Design & Design Thinking

Use Customer Journey Mapping to Create a Storytelling and Decision Making Framework
The most effective journey maps go beyond simply capturing and representing data in a visual format to tell a story about your customer’s experience from their perspective. They help to create empathy for your customers AND support growth-oriented decision making within your organization.

Interviews as a User Research method are great in giving you the big picture. Although you can always just use Surveys or any other quantitative method.

So why is it better to hear instead of read about it?

*cough* empathy *cough*

Some of the aims of Design Thinking's approach are to create:

• greater inclusiveness
• better team cohesion
• higher levels of collaboration and interaction
• increased creative confidence
• Everyone thinks, feels, and experiences things differently. Differences are what we need. Knowing that certain activities are not natural for everyone means that some preparation, explanation, and trust-building, before the launch, can go a long way towards preventing people from jumping ship.

Some of the obstacles the process aims to overcome:

• Fear of failure
• Intimidation
• Low self esteem
• Hierarchy
• Creative blocks
• Blind spots
• Specialisation bias

Why are immersion and empathy critical to the design thinking process?

When you observe users, you see what they actually go through. But when you actually do it, that’s when you can really understand how difficult some things may be, or understand the emotions that some challenges are creating. I may tell you that changing the tire of my car is difficult, but in order for you to understand why it’s difficult, you would probably want to do it yourself. Or, I may tell you that I find a particular task challenging, but you may be able to better appreciate how challenging it is when you try to do it yourself.

To begin, let’s have a quick overview of the fundamental principles behind Design Thinking:

Design Thinking starts with empathy, a deep human focus, in order to gain insights which may reveal new and unexplored ways of seeing, and courses of action to follow in bringing about preferred situations for business and society.

What Is Empathy Exactly?
In a general sense, empathy is our ability to see the world through other people's eyes, to see what they see, feel what they feel, and experience things as they do. Of course, none of us can fully experience things the way someone else does, but we can attempt to get as close as possible, and we do this by putting aside our own preconceived ideas and choosing to understand the ideas, thoughts, and needs of others instead.

In Design Thinking, empathy is, as explained in IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, a “deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”. It involves learning about the difficulties people face, as well as uncovering their latent needs and desires in order to explain their behaviours. To do so, we need to have an understanding of the people’s environment, as well as their roles in and interactions with their environment.

Storytelling plays a huge role in User Experience design and in the Design Thinking process. Storytelling creates a compelling narrative around the people we’re designing for so that we as designers can develop a deep and emotional understanding of their motivations and needs. ...

A story share-and-capture session is usually undertaken after ethnographic research—i.e., using design thinking methods such as “conducting interviews with empathy”, “building empathy with analogies”, and asking the “5 why’s.” In a story share-and-capture session, team members share the observations they each made in the field in the form of stories. Each member will share what they observed, and the rest of the team will note down interesting insights or quotes from the story.

BY RIKKE FRIIS DAM TEO YU SIANG

To begin, let’s have a quick overview of the fundamental principles behind Design Thinking:

Design Thinking starts with empathy, a deep human focus, in order to gain insights which may reveal new and unexplored ways of seeing, and courses of action to follow in bringing about preferred situations for business and society.

Using Empathy Maps
Empathy maps are a great way to add structure to your user interviews and to provide a contextual framework for gaining insight into your users’ motivations, goals and expectations. Research helps you to understand the “why,” and also the “when” and “where,” users may interact with your digital product or service.

Focusing on user goals will help you define benchmarks for evaluating if the design solution is meeting user expectations.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our empathy project, a collaboration to spark empathy and understanding in our classrooms and communities. As educators on the frontlines, we’re constantly navigating the complexities of building inclusive spaces within diverse communities. But now more than ever, striving for safe and supportive environments for all learners feels urgent.

We recently heard from Jazmin, a high school English Language Arts teacher in El Paso Independent School District, about a story that reminded us of the importance of empathy for and between students. “Our football team arrived on a Dallas field for an away game to a crowd of students yelling: ‘Go home’ and ‘Build a wall’”, she said. “We really didn’t know how to repair after that.” How does a classroom repair after that? How might we surface shared experiences so that we feel more connected? This is what we want your help in solving:

How might we build empathy for and across students so that we serve their diverse needs and better understand each other?

Discover

Share insights! Empathize. We’re not designing yet. Post inspirations, interview others, and get insight from outside of education.

MISSIONS

• Conduct an Interview
• Share a Story
• Find Analagous Inspiration
• Shadow a Student
• Other

Ideate

Share your ideas!

This 1-Day Design Thinking Course has been designed to help facilitators, practitioners and researchers renew their focus on empathy generation and what it means during a Design Thinking process.

Often described as a human-centered approach to innovation, Design Thinking is being used across the globe in a wide range of settings and industries, including public and private companies, non-profits, universities, and government agencies. In this Design Thinking Workshop, we will apply Human Centric Design principles to explore empathy across the phases of the Design Thinking framework.

The Program begins with an overview of Design Thinking to provide participants with an overview of the tools and methods of Design Thinking. We will then dig deep into Empathy, what it is and how to help participants better connect to themselves and those around them.

‘Design Thinking and Empathy Generation’ will be held on the 13th of February 2017

Does UX ability require empathy? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Strictly speaking, user experience design does not require empathy, but it’s a huge practical advantage. I like getting definitions on the table first to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Both UX and Empathy can be broad words.

Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

User Experience: the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

Empathy by Design is an experiential online workshop for individuals motivated to lead their team and organization, with or without authority, through the difficult process of change, development, or innovation.

 Seung Chan Lim (Slim) believes leaders who have empathic relationships with themselves, their family members, their team, and their customers not only have lives that are more healthy & meaningful but also more creative & effective.

Human-centered design sits at the intersection of empathy and creativity

We use human-centered design to create products, services, and experiences that improve the lives of people living in poverty.

Have a look at some of these headlines (some of the articles are more nuanced than the headlines imply):

Emulating Empathy

• Why every tech company needs to integrate empathy
• Facebook adds “empathy” reactions
• Empathy Machine
• When tech people casually reference empathy they’re treating it like just another commodity. This isn’t intentional or malicious. It’s a by-product of living in a world of ultimate convenience and privilege. But you can’t order up empathy the way you can order a ride or dinner.

Empathy takes practice.

by Pamela Malinowski, eighth grade science teacher

In a science lesson coordinating with a recent guest speaker and reading in English class, eighth graders used Design Thinking and simple machines to create devices for people with disabilities.

The students in my eighth-grade science class had an introduction to Design Thinking last week. Instead of designing a wallet or some other similar device, my hope was to expose them to some experiences with which they may not be as familiar. Each student, upon entering the room was assigned a certain disability: they either were confined to a wheelchair or they had an arm amputated. At each station was a task they were asked to accomplish. These tasks included pouring cake batter from a bowl into a cake pan with only one arm, cutting carrots into thin strips with one arm, and seeing what was cooking on a stove from the vantage point of a wheelchair.

In total there were 11 different scenarios, and each student had a chance to try his or her task to gain a sense of empathy for living without being fully physically abled.  

Step 1: Fill out the Empathy Map

1. Lay the four quadrants out on a table, draw them on paper or on a whiteboard.
2. Review your notes, pictures, audio, and video from your research/fieldwork and fill out each of the four quadrants while defining and synthesising:
3. What did the user SAY? Write down significant quotes and key words that the user said.
4. What did the user DO? Describe which actions and behaviours you noticed or insert pictures or drawing.
5. What did the user THINK? Dig deeper. What do you think that your user might be thinking? What are their motivations, their goals, their needs, their desires? What does this tell you about his or her beliefs?
6. How did the user FEEL? What emotions might your user be feeling? Take subtle cues like body language and their choice of words and tone of voice into account.

Design Thinking cannot begin without a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for. To gain those insights, it is important for design thinkers to empathise with the people they’re designing for to understand their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations. The good news is that there are a wide range of methods you can use in order to learn more about people. Even better news: with enough mindfulness and experience, anyone can become masters at empathising with people.

Developing Empathy towards People
The first stage (or mode) of the d.school’s Design Thinking process involves developing a sense of empathy towards the people you are designing for, to gain insights into what they need, what they want, how they behave, feel, and think, and why they demonstrate such behaviours, feelings, and thoughts when interacting with products in a real-world setting.

Ethnographic research can add huge value to User Experience design and Design Thinking processes because it is essentially Human-centred. It’s important to focus on and empathise with the people you design for, and truly listen to and understand them, rather than concentrating on your expected process outcomes.

The footloose globalists are less confident of their position as vanguards of the future, and empathy has been suggested to heal societal divides, writes the director of trend forecasting at J. Walter Thompson.

While empathy was touted here and throughout the festival as a panacea for problems both personal and political, at least some SXSW attendees weren’t buying it. Ashley Baccus-Clark, a speculative neuroscientist and member of the Hyphen-Labs collective of women of color working at the intersection of creativity and technology, rejects the "empathy" label when it comes to her VR work.

At SXSW, Hyphen-Labs was showing NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, a VR piece that immerses viewers into a futuristic beauty salon, where they are implanted with mind-expanding electrodes. After I saw the piece, Baccus-Clark told me she all the talk of "empathy" in VR actually distracts from the story and the people telling it.

by Shepherd Laughlin

When executed properly, “Design thinking teaches students the value of empathy for others, collaboration with team members, and the many intricacies of creative problem solving,” says Stein Greenberg.

(English) This 1-Day Design Thinking Course has been designed to help facilitators, practitioners and researchers renew their focus on empathy generation and what it means during a Design Thinking process.

Often described as a human-centered approach to innovation, Design Thinking is being used across the globe in a wide range of settings and industries, including public and private companies, non-profits, universities, and government agencies. In this Design Thinking Workshop, we will apply Human Centric Design principles to explore empathy across the phases of the Design Thinking framework.

The Program begins with an overview of Design Thinking