Empathize
Empathy is the foundation of design thinking. The problems you’re trying to solve are rarely your own; they’re those of particular users. Build empathy for your users by learning their values. To empathize, you observe, immerse, and engage.
Let’s dig in
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Empathy is the earnest attempt at seeing the world from other people's vantage point. We can never fully empathize with someone else's experience, but we can leverage tools to help get us closer to a place of understanding.
There are four key ingredients to accomplishing this: the ability to take someone else's perspective, observing non-judgmentally, recognizing emotions, and the ability to reflect back what we've heard about the other person's experience (compliments of the nursing scholar, Theresa Wiseman).
Designing around emotional experiences is a foundational practice. People behave in response to emotional drivers, so if we can create ways to elicit strong, positive emotions, we are able to innovate in game-changing territory that meets the human needs of our stakeholders.
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…you are exploring a challenge that requires a better understanding of users’ unmet needs.
…you want to make sure you're focusing on the right problem.
…you want to challenge assumptions you have about an opportunity space.
…you want to galvanize your team to care about a project.
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Observe: Take an objective stance toward witnessing your users in action to understand their experience.
Immerse: Embody your user's experience in order to relate and uncover areas of possible exploration.
Engage: Interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters.
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