I had an interesting discussion with someone the other day about empathy in UX design which I wanted to expand on. I will use this as a reply to that conversation, as I realise I haven’t fully considered what Empathy is.
It seems in UX design empathy gets misunderstood where we have to feel the feelings of our users but empathy means you design to help others not yourself. So I think there’s a distinction to be made there.
The problem with our understanding of empathy is we sometimes think we have to know what the other person is feeling, and that’s actually quite a different exercise. We’re not therapists as UX designers.
What we can do is have empathy for what they do day to day, and how we can help them do that better.
So I think empathy is a difficult word to use, it might even be having sympathy for their struggles rather than empathy. I wonder if we use the word sympathy instead, and there would be a lot less confusion?
But maybe I’m wrong! I’m getting caught up in my misunderstanding of Sympathy and Empathy which makes it difficult to understand the difference between them. So I went to a site I trust for research in the UX space, the Nielsen Norman Group. There they define Sympathy and Empathy as:
Sympathy: “the acknowledgement of the suffering of others, which carries with it an emotional reaction on the part of the listener.”
Empathy, on the other hand, is a little more complex, and also more subjective: “The ability to fully understand, mirror, then share another person’s expressions, needs, and motivations.”
According to NNG there is a spectrum of Empathy that starts at Pity and moves its way up to Compassion. As UX designers we stop one level short at Empathy so we can stay impartial and thus help fix the problem rather than being caught up in the emotions expressed which can cloud our judgement.
Empathy is the balance between feeling and understanding, and is key to us first knowing our user persona, and then understanding their pain points along their user journey. This context allows us to design more closely aligned to their needs.
I think it’s the impartiality of Empathy that we lean on as UX Designers; if we get too close to the emotional side, we lose our objectivity. We also have to be careful not to depend too much on the facts, or we miss the chance to design for real positive change.