How To Empathize With Your Users
Learn how to put yourself in your users’ shoes and understand their needs and feelings
When we empathize with our users, we create successful products. Here are some design tools and tips that can help you enhance user empathy and improve your UX research.
This guide will help you understand when to apply user empathy to your design process, what tools to use, and why understanding your users is beneficial when designing your product.
Empathy comes from a field of understanding — knowing what others are going through, their pain, and their emotions. It’s not just related to their situation. Empathy means seeing yourself going through these very situations. But what does that have to do with design?
User Empathy
User empathy allows designers to “put themselves in the shoes of their users” and fully understand their perspectives, needs, fears, and motivations. This activity is essential to the design of innovative products.
“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without understanding what others see, feel and experience, design is a meaningless task.” — Tim Brown, IDEO. The purpose of design is to solve a problem or allow the user to solve a problem. Also, unlike empathy, empathy drives designers to find solutions to user problems. This solution-seeking behavior makes empathy greater than empathy in design.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, compassion is the more complete embodiment of empathy, and sympathy is a disjointed and abstract version of sympathy.
Design teams may not be expected to empathize with their users, but empathy is certainly necessary to build successful products.
When you practice empathy in your design process
Design teams are encouraged to put users at the forefront of the design process. However, there is a point in the design process where user empathy must be practiced using available tools and techniques. And they are divided into the following three areas.
Empathy in UX research
In other disciplines, empathy may be a soft skill, but for UX researchers it’s a powerful tool for impactful user research. User research is the first and most important step in building a successful product. Ultimately, if users are misunderstood or misunderstood, you run the risk of developing an entire product based on misunderstandings and assumptions.
User research lays the foundation for how a company or design team understands its end user and selects product designs. But as humans, we are always biased in some way. Actively practiced empathy, therefore, helps UX researchers put their perspective aside.
His empathetic UX research techniques, such as user interviews and contextual research, are used at various stages of product development. Qualitative research takes UX researchers beyond “facts and figures” to the “why” behind user behavior related to products.
Empathy in UX design
There’s a reason empathy is the first step in design thinking. This is the only way to develop human-centered products that meet real needs.
The importance of empathy is summarized in the following general UX design rule of thumb:
“You are not your user.”
This mantra became necessary in the design world because it’s human nature to assume that people think and react to certain things the same way you do. It is common to project behaviors, likes, and dislikes onto others.
For UX designers, this means assuming that users understand your product the same way you do. But there’s a way to avoid making a product that’s only for you by practicing user empathy. One of the ways he is a user is through his persona. It is a tool that serves as a unified source of truth throughout product development. Prioritizing user needs, motivations, and pain points are paramount in UX design. Incorporating empathy into the design process allows you to design effective products with seamless user flow and great UI designs that enhance user experience.
UX that writes empathy
When people use your product, they enter into a give-and-take relationship. They give you limited attention and expect to get value from you. The only way they can achieve this value is through effective communication, the words within the product. Think of it this way. You are looking for a restaurant when its decoration catches your eye. You are excited to try their food but you can’t understand the menu. So many communication issues and you never get the food you expect. Frustrated, you get up and leave. The same is true for digital products.
Good design doesn’t matter anymore if you don’t get the UX right.
As in UX design, empathy in UX writing begins with qualitative research. User Experience Writers consider users’ needs, and motivations, and used them to identify and eliminate problems that users may face while using a product. It’s not just words on the screen. This is the only way for users to understand the product and use it for their needs. Empathy is needed to properly guide and communicate with users for a seamless and productive experience. A basic rule of UX writing is to keep your text concise, clear, and consistent across your product.
How to use tools and techniques to empathize with end users
With empathy becoming more and more a must-have skill in the design industry, there are a variety of tools available to help design teams empathize with users at different stages of the design process. Let’s look at some.
User interview
The best way to get to know your users is to engage with them. For empathic design, unstructured or semi-structured user interviews are preferred by UX researchers because they provide enough space for users to express themselves.
Unstructured user interviews are often done at the beginning of a project to gather meaningful qualitative data about users. Semi-structured user interviews, on the other hand, are typically conducted when a prototype is designed so that UX researchers can observe and understand how people use the product.
The golden rule when conducting user interviews is to listen to the user’s point of view. It doesn’t matter how different it is from your point of view.
Empathy Maps
Use empathy maps at the beginning of your design project to analyze and categorize key data collected from user interviews. You can visually communicate your user findings to your team, help them gain deeper insights about your users, and even create user personas.
Designed by Paul Boag, this 5-quadrant empathy map includes the user’s pains and benefits. It builds on traditional empathy maps that focus on what users say, think, feel, and do as they perform tasks.
Journey Maps
A journey map is another research tool that helps you empathize with your users by recording the series of actions they take in your app. When creating a journey map, designers keep the user personas in mind and follow the journey from their perspective.
This allows designers to visualize a user’s step-by-step interaction with the product and identify any pain points encountered in achieving their goals. Journey maps are one of the best ways to keep your user flow, design, and content aligned with your users’ needs.
Designed by Paul Boag, this 5-quadrant empathy map includes the user’s pains and benefits. It builds on traditional empathy maps that focus on what users say, think, feel, and do as they perform tasks.
Journey Maps
A journey map is another research tool that helps you empathize with your users by recording the series of actions they take in your app. When creating a journey map, designers keep the user personas in mind and follow the journey from their perspective.
This allows designers to visualize a user’s step-by-step interaction with the product and identify any pain points encountered in achieving their goals. Journey maps are one of the best ways to keep your user flow, design, and content aligned with your users’ needs.
User Persona
User personas are a commonly used tool to keep users at the forefront of the design process. This is typically a semi-fictional character based on user research whose traits represent common traits found within a group of user types.
User personas help design teams keep specific users in mind when designing products. They contain information such as demographic profiles, goals, background, usage, and motivations.
User personas contain real-world data gathered from user research to represent your ideal user. card sorting
Research tools such as card sorting can help you prioritize your users when designing the information architecture of your website or app.
People have different mental models and therefore different expectations of how websites and apps work. Card sorting gives UX researchers a clearer insight into the user’s mind, helping them understand how they sort information.
There are three ways to sort cards.
Open, Closed, Hybrid. Each is used at different times for different reasons. A simple and effective way to design with empathy.
General tips to better understand your users
In addition to design tools, there are ways to prioritize empathy throughout the design process.
beware of your prejudices
Observe how users interact with products in their natural environment
Be aware of user vocabulary. Users are often the best authors.
Ask open-ended questions
Hire a diverse team and recruit diverse user groups
try the product yourself
sympathy:
Keys to building successful products
Designing a product to make a profit is good, but a product that prioritizes user empathy is even better. They are often game changers like iPod, Uber, and many other companies.
By understanding your users and seeing things from their point of view, you can develop valuable and profitable products that meet real needs. It can also remove biased assumptions early and prevent costly mistakes.
choose facts over assumptions
Of course, we make a lot of assumptions in our daily lives — and we tend to do the same in design. We assume that users think like us and want features that we think are great, but often that’s not the case. When it comes to design, unfactual empathy is misleading.
So know who your users are, understand them, and embrace their point of view. Time and practice will help you master empathy and build a worthwhile product.
Where to learn more
For more information on the above methods, we highly recommend the following online courses:
Design thinking:
ultimate guide
travel mapping
User Research — Methodology and Best Practices
If you’re just getting started with UX design, check out his free open-source library of UX literature from the Interaction Design Foundation here.
As a UX designer looking to improve your user research skills? Consider a specialized user research Bootcamp. This is a 3-month fully remote, part-time, cohort-based learning experience that allows you to interact with students from all over the world and receive hands-on practice and personalized attention. Check out our other UX design boot camps here.
