Empathize

Whereas collecting information is a relatively straightforward process for most people, gathering and understanding emotions is a totally different skill.

Design techniques for empathy break that barrier and go behind emotions, which ultimately dictate what choices we make. And when we take decisions, we are essentially emotional animals.

Few decisions are genuinely rational.

Empathy is the basis of people-centred design

it brings ideas and solutions closer to the people they are intended for, whether customers, staff, or friends.

Empathy has 3 stages. First we observe people in the context we want to study – shopping in a supermarket, choosing an investment product with their account manager, taking a bus, speaking to customers in a call centre. Then we interact, interviewing people, trying to understand what they think, what they feel or what they do.

Finally, we live the same situation we are observing – whether it is buying financial products or using public transport.

Design thinking means understanding the people we are creating solutions for. Problems are not universal – we really have to stand in other people’s shoes. Observing what people do in their natural environment (work, leisure, home...) gives us strong clues about what they really think, and more useful ones than traditional methods such as just interviewing – physical and behavioural reactions are revealing.

These methods have been borrowed from anthropology and psychology, and show more clearly the deep reasons behind our individual decisions. They also expose the real needs of people, even when these are needs they aren’t aware of. They lead much more directly to innovations that no one asked for, but which in the end prove to be very much needed.

Through habit and also some crystallisation of common reasoning, we learn to filter out what appears to be noise around us, and focus our attention on verbal and written communication.

Most of the important information about human behaviour eludes us, and we have to relearn how to capture this information. The various methods of empathy help us return to that path, to understand the values that guide people, the emotions that lead them to select and decide, the reasoning that helps them choose and the beliefs in which they are rooted.

Needs, values, beliefs, emotions and thinking patterns – all this is crucial information when we want to define solutions with a better chance of being adopted. Information that is not at all obvious to the subject of the design study.

Our brain creates an image of the world that favours and defends us, so only an indirect approach, such as observation, can reveal what a direct method, like interviewing cannot. It is interesting, for instance, how a person who tells a story indirectly exposes their needs and beliefs, which explains why this is a favourite technique among Design Thinkers.

The oblique approach of empathy is deeply revealing. It surprises us with the wealth of additional information we can work with to get the best results.