Empathy is not Enough
In the design world, the word ‘empathy’ is tossed around quite a lot - meaning the ability to understand another person’s feelings or experiences. To be a good designer you must be able to empathize with your users, team members, and clients. But what happens when empathy isn’t enough? It’s important to be able to understand someone else and put yourself in their shoes, but as designers, we must strive to do more.
In my experience working in a variety of design-related roles, I’ve come to learn that regardless of which role you play on your design team, great design is not just about empathy. It’s about compassion, listening, and learning. As designers, we must ask ourselves, “are we being motivated to go out of our way to not only understand our users’ feelings, but to actually help them?”
I recently read a fascinating article by Marli Mesibov titled ‘Empathy is Not the Answer to UX Design’. Mesibov explains that UX design needs research, not empathy, to address users’ needs and design meaningful solutions. The author argues, “As UX designers, it’s not our job to empathize. It’s our job to listen, learn, experiment, test, and improve.” I agree with Mesibov’s theory. It’s helpful to understand what others are feeling, but a great designer needs to dive deeper. Conducting thorough user research, being curious about your problem space, and prioritizing the discovery stage of a design challenge is how we as designers can go beyond empathizing with our users and begin to think objectively about how we can solve the problem at hand. Putting ourselves in the users’ shoes, while often considered a best practice, can sometimes limit us to focus on our related experiences, rather than the experiences of those we have interviewed and researched.
Unpack your bias. When empathizing with your users, do you experience their feelings the same way they do? Or are your unique experiences and perspectives shifting the way you perceive your users’ needs?
For example, I am currently working to help design a mental health app. While I conduct user research, I can try to empathize with others’ feelings of hopelessness, worry, and the emotional pain of struggling with mental health. However, being in these people’s shoes and feeling what they are feeling, is not the optimal mindset to be in while designing. Instead, rather than try to feel the same way these individuals do, and risk prioritizing experiences that align more with my own, I need to focus on sympathizing with these users and feel compassion towards the users’ feelings. Designers can be sympathetic towards someone’s feelings, but everyone’s unique experiences cannot always allow us to empathize and feel exactly what our users are feeling in the way they are feeling them.
Empathy is not enough to design great products. Unpacking your bias, looking for ways to build sympathy and compassion for others, and guiding your design decisions with research is the best way to create a user-centred design that addresses users’ needs. Understanding is great, but a biased view of the issues at hand will never truly fix anything. It’s time to check in with our idea of empathy, and refocus on listening, learning, and building compassion to design solutions that genuinely help others. That is what will truly create great design.