UX Design: How to Develop Empathy Toward Your Audience By Jenna Erickson, Codal Inc
Using empathy in design is the ability to understand the emotions, feelings and goals of the target market of any digital product. Most UX design companies will utilize empathy in their user experience design process in order to ensure that their design is going to be what a user wants and needs. Using empathy is all about collecting subjective pieces of information, and analyzing it with an unbiased mindset. One of the best ways to collect this information, is to completely insert yourself in the context of the target market of users, put yourself in their shoes, and start gaining insights into their everyday experiences. You can start by simply watching how people interact and behave, asking potential users a series of questions, and experiencing various things first-hand. Empathy isn’t something that would be necessarily listed under ‘user experience design services,’ however, it would be used throughout different stages of the design process. Why is Empathy Important in UX? Empathy is important because a user experience designer is not designing just a product, they are designing the experience that a user has while they are using a product. Therefore, a UX designer needs to understand various things about their users, not just what they expect from an app. Instead of just understanding what a user needs to perform a task, it is crucial to learn what the user’s goals are, what they are aiming for, and
how they are feeling when they try to reach those goals. In order to learn these things, getting an empathic thought is critical. You may have experienced an interaction in your life, that later made you feel more supportive or accommodating for someone else. This is similar to empathy in design; empathic design allows the designer to understand the mindset and positioning of the user. The risks of any product design and development is on the higher side.The rewards of product design are also very high, which is why it’s so important for a UX UI design company or software development agency to utilize empathic feelings during the design research process. Getting Started Developing Empathy Below are four general steps to get you started gathering insights into your users world: Exploration and Analysis The first step is to enter the user’s world. If your app development agency is building an iOS app for the workflow of accountants, you may not know what the day-to-day life is like in an accountant’s office. You should then start by checking out the “behind the scenes” in order to get a glimpse of the life of an accountant. This will get your mind in the zone, and start triggering more curious thoughts.
Immerse Yourself The second step is to to start collecting qualitative data while you are understanding what the day-to-day is. Start completely immersing yourself into the user’s work, by talking to an array of employees at the accounting office, taking photos, and diving deeper into what a day in the life of an accounting office is. As another example, attend a full day of meetings, whether internal, or with clients of the accounting firm to fully immerse yourself in the experiences of an accountant. This will allow you to empathize with the experience of users, from their point of view Create Meaning Now it is time to start resonating with the user, using your own experiences to connect with the user and create a bigger meaning. Sometimes, this will innately happen when you’re collecting the data altogether. For example, you may discover that the accountants are frustrated with the fact that they all do not have a centralized place to find client documents.
This may resonate with an experience you had at a college where Blackboard, or any student portal was non-existent. You begin to remember the feelings this brought you, you are able to recognize the context and have empathic feelings toward the user. Step Back Lastly, you need to detach yourself from being a designer and start reflecting on all of your ideas that you have collected. While these empathic insights are extremely valuable, you need to translate these feelings and insights into real ideas. Being able to empathize with the user, allows you to design a solution experience that will solve the user’s frustrations, as a perfect end-product. Conclusion The best way to collect the most relevant information is to completely immerse yourself into the context of the potential users of the project. Getting empathic insights from potential users means that you will be able to design an amazing experience, and overall product. Empathic-based designs will help build a data-driven portfolio for your ​application development agency.
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