Reach out to your user. Listen, empathize, understand. At any stage of your UX process, your users are your greatest allies.

Em•pa•thy

The ability to understand and share someone’s feelings, moods, and thoughts in any given situation.

Users come first

Developing products and services serves first and foremost our users. As UX designers, we are tasked to understand our users in depth. We do this by conducting extensive user research, continually gathering feedback from our users, and observing how they interact with our products.

In UX design, be it a product or service, we can’t take our users for granted. The needs of our users shift continually, in tandem with societal and economic shifts. Furthermore, user trends and priorities shift.

For example, just as technology is expanding at a rapid pace, users’ tech needs and participation in technology shift at a rapid pace.

We must be open to receive any user’s feedback with a wide-open empathetic abilitity.

To deeply understand our users, UX designers must have a superb understanding of being empathetic to users’ needs.

Empathy is a soft skill

In their Harvard Business Review [HBR] report on Leadership And Managing People, authors Brian Kropp, Alexia Cambon, and Sara Clark highlight how the post-Covid hybrid-remote workplace and automation trends, along with changing employee expectations, require managers to …

… understand the importance of how employees are feeling. To be successful in this new [post-Covid] environment, managers must lead with empathy. [1]

Empathy requires a leader to be able to place themselves into the context of the direct reports and their experiences.

Being empathetic means developing superb abilities to gather feedback from users and to understand why this user gave this particular feedback.

Empathy requires a foundation in trust and care. Accepting cultural differences without judgement within a team or group of users is as important as accepting each person’s voice to express their feelings.

Empathy skills can get practiced and developed over time

To start with, as UX designers, we can practice empathy with each other. We can create safe spaces where we allow each other to express our ideas and opinions freely. This can be done in a chat room discussing a project, as one-on-one dialogues, or as a series of sessions over time. The important thing is to establish this space as a safe space for practice.

UX designers conducting active research with users need to be comfortable with their skill levels as interviewers. We need to know when to go in depth in an interview, or when to call it finished if the interviewee proves to be too tired or distressed.

Create a peer support system to develop the empathetic mind

As with any hard skill, investing time to learn and understand empathy requires support from other professionals in the field to guide and mentor. Develop this network of like-minded UX professionals, and ask for the input as you grow. Develop a sense of humbleness, especially when it comes to learning soft skills.

Applying empathy in UX

The most important step for a UX designer is to let go of your ego. Instead, develop your list of research methods, user interviews and user observations. Spend quality time defining your open-ended questions for your interviews. Focus on diving into data gathering on user behaviors, motivations, pain points, goals.[2]

During interviews, engage in active listening to hear everything your users are telling you. The interview is about their stories, experiences, pains. Receive their feedback with an open heart and mind.[3]

As a UX designer, let go of your ego. UX is all about your users’ input. It is their story.

In summary

Empathy involves understanding and active engagement.

Empathy is about understanding the other person and her/his words, needs, and motivations.

Empathy enables us as UX designers to not only see the user’s pain points, but also what limitations, reasonings, hopes, or goals the user has.

Practice empathy with your peers, and then with your users.

References:

[1] What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today? HBR. https://hbr.org/2021/04/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-manager-today

[2] How to semantically formulate your UX questions. https://evaschicker2012.medium.com/how-to-semantically-formulate-your-ux-questions-a63b2fb0a75a?sk=ce0763cc1b47f6c2730197b8dd17f3bd

[3] The Art of Listening in UX. Prototypr. https://blog.prototypr.io/the-art-of-listening-123b16280292?sk=85ea20bf689fa7f58927727b27f3f431

Thank you for being a passionate reader on UX design insights. Join Medium here with my link and support learnings and insights on design, UX, html/css, and visual trends in general.

See you soon again!