Empathy: The Gen for Concept Generation

Empathy is the ability to understand and care about someone else’s emotional state. It's putting yourself in their shoes. Empathy plays a huge part in all our relationships. Once Albert Einstein said, “Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes. It is not learned much in School; it is cultivated over a lifetime”

Design thinking considers that the people who face problems are the ones who hold the key to their problem’s answer. Therefore, empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. Humancentered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they are looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actuals needs and wants. Human –Centered designers are unlike other problem solvers: they tinker and test; fail early and often, and they spend a surprising amount of time not knowing the answer to the challenge at hand. Yet they forge ahead until they find a wild solution, which is concealed in the minds of people.

The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about the world, and what is meaningful to them.

WHY Empathize?

As a design thinker, it is critical to know real life experiences of users. The problems that are trying to solve are not ours— they are those of a particular group of users; so in order to design for them, gaining empathyis a must and it should be a whole hearted and genuine effort of design thinkers. Observing what people do and how they interact with their environment gives you clues about what they think and feel. It also helps you learn about what they need. By watching people, one can capture physical signs of their experiences: what they do and say. This will allow you to infer the intangible meaning of those experiences in order to uncover insights. These insights give you direction to create innovative solutions. The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behaviour. But learning to recognize those insights is harder than the designer might think. Our minds automatically filter a lot of information without our knowledge.Design thinkers need to learn to see things “with a fresh set of eyes,” and empathizing is what gives us those new eyes. Engaging with people directly reveals a tremendous amount about the way they think and the values they hold. Sometimes these thoughts and values are not obvious to the people who hold them, and a good conversation can surprise both the designer and the subject by the unanticipated insights that are revealed. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of these beliefs and values (HassoPlattner, 2010).

HOW to Empathize?

Design thinkers make use of many techniques to experience the behaviour of users.

Interview

Interview is the simplest mode of collecting data on views and pain points of people on current products and services that they consumeconsistently. Regular customer meetings where designer investigates current workflows, the environment in which people work, their expectations are important to view users and their behavior in the context of their lives. There’s an interesting framework developed by Sakichi Toyoda that was used within Toyota during the evolution of its Toyota Production System. Keep on asking why for nearly five times surfaces the real root cause for a given problem. You start with a statement of the situation and ask why it occurred. You then turn the answer to the first question into a second Why question. The next answer becomes the third Why question and so on. Though this technique is called ‘5-Whys’, five is a rule of thumbimplied in the Five Whys root cause analysis tool, though not often stated openly, is the use of a cause and effect tree—known as a

Observation to identify the Gap

Observing the user gives the designer a different experience. If you ask, “Do you have issues buying thing online?”, you will probably hear, “No, it’s very easy to buy things there.” But if you watch a person using it from behind their shoulders, you will see pain points along the way. When you ask from a student to do some calculation using an excel worksheet, you will see how much a student struggles arranging data etc. Very quickly, a teacher can identify where students need assistance and where the product gaps are. These are inputs for designers to come up with the next version of the products. As much as possible do observations in relevant contexts in addition to interviews. Some of the most powerful realizations come from noticing a disconnection between what someone says and what he does.

Experienceto Understand the Pain Points

This is the most critical mode of understanding with regard to a customer for making a change of a product or service. The first step is to use what customer uses and gain a real life experience. It can be your own product, or it can be a competitor’s. This will give you direct access to the pain points and feelings of enjoyment your users experience. Moreover, the designer should walk with the customer: have them physically go through the steps and talk through asking why customers do each and every step to complete the process. Real, win and worth are key areas to be mastered before designing a product or service. Understanding real needs, win over competitors and worthwhile in terms of profits are to be answered before launching a new project.

For your feedback: dg@nibm.lk