Building Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, to be able to put yourself in their shoes. Empathy can easily be confused with sympathy, which is actually about feeling compassion or pity for the difficulties of another individual,
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Building Empathy Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, to be able to put yourself in their shoes. Empathy can easily be confused with sympathy, which is actually about feeling compassion or pity for the difficulties of another individual, but lacks the aspect of understanding the feelings of the party to which you are sympathetic. In order to be able to empathize with someone, to share their feelings, you must either share a real connection with them or encounter the same experience. In earlier chapters, we mentioned that everyone’s experiences are unique; their view of the world is filtered through their own previous experiences and needs, particular to them. Although it could be argued that the exact same experience will never be had by two different individuals, it is possible to empathize with an, albeit slightly generalized, experience that an aggregation of people – perhaps a persona – will have in relation to a product. For a developer, as well as other members of a product team, the most reasonable and accessible approach to creating empathy with users is to go through an experience as they would, while being informed and guided by their motivations and goals. The best way in which you can generate empathy is to come into contact with real users, to create that real connection with them. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to give all members of the team access to their users – in fact, it can be rather difficult to get any access to users at all in some cases – and business constraints tend to come in to play with regard to budgets and timescales. However, a lack of direct access to users should not prevent us from trying to generate that empathy with our users. There are a number of tools and techniques that user experience designers have at their disposal that can help reduce the gulf that can exist between the developer and the user. Although you, as a developer, may not be the one to organize and conduct these methods of user research and analysis, it is important that you understand what they are, how they are conducted, and how you can utilize their outcomes in your own role.
© Westley Knight 2019 W. Knight, UX for Developers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4227-8_7
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Chapter 7
Building Empathy
User Research User research is the foundation on which any user experience is built. Without it, everything that follows is created without the knowledge of our users, their needs, or their goals. To do this is to build your castle on shifting sands, never truly knowing what you should be aiming to achieve, or how to satisfy your user’s needs. User research consists of a number of different techniques that can be used to learn more about your users: contextual inquiry, focus groups, individual interviews, card sorting, task analysis, and more. Each of these methods can be used at varying stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC), but all of them contribute toward you getting to understand your users. Let’s take a little look into what is involved with
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