Ever felt cheated or disappointed by a new app or a product? Like you’ve been curious about it since its announcement and been wanting to get hands on with it for quite some time but when it finally arrived, it didn’t live up to your expectations.
Happened before?
Well, the reason is simple – it’s not you, it’s the design.
Tons of great ideas, products and apps have bombed because they weren’t designed properly. Designed properly in the sense that designers either went overboard with their ideas or considered the project their portfolio piece.
Somewhere between ambition and ideation, the product lost itself to pride and prejudice, leading to a poor, confusing or disconnected design.
Honestly, users can instantly spot a bad design. They might not be able to articulate it in words but they could surely tell something’s off.
Why Does This Happen?
Often, designers have tons of ideas running in their mind about a product or an app that they want to project on it. The urge to experiment and go with their instincts kicks in intensively sometimes and they conveniently oblige. In the end, there rolls out a product that simply reflects the perception and reflection of the designer and nothing else. That’s why when users experience the product for the first time, they can’t seem to establish a connection.
This way, businesses fail to get a hold in the market.
Is There A Solution?
Solution? No, solutions exist for problems. What we are talking about is a misconception and for this, there exists clarity. This is exactly what this post is going to be about – clarity on how you could approach designing through what we call empathetic designing.
For the uninitiated, design thinking is a more humane way of approaching your designing process by putting yourself in the shoes of your end users or audiences. Empathetic designing goes a step further in actually understanding their emotions, states of mind, situation and more.
We will explore this in detail in this extensive guide to designing an app. So, let’s get started.
What Is Empathy In Design Thinking?
It’s simple. It’s the difference between,”I wonder what I could do differently to make this app standout from the crowd,” and,”I wonder what pain points my users face when using an app and the ways I could fix them in my design.”
Empathy is never about what you as a designer could bring into a project. It’s all about what your users need.
To help you get a better idea, the English language defines empathy as an action of being sensitive to others’ emotions, thoughts, feelings and experiences. It’s about understanding things from their perspective. When it comes to design thinking, empathy becomes all about understanding their pain points, their difficulties and hardships using a solution, the features they look forward to, elements that could be supportive of their incompetencies or technical inadequacies and more.
Being empathetic when designing can make the lives of their users easier by truly allowing them to accomplish their needs and demands in the simplest ways possible. This concept puts the experience, ease of use and satisfaction of end users at the pedestal in every minute aspect of user interaction, making the way for a wholesome design.
How Important Is Empathy In Design Thinking?
Imagine you’re the designer of an on-demand pharmaceutical app. Now, visualize this. The pandemic happened and lockdown restrictions are in place. People are scared to step out of their houses fearing contracting the disease. There’s a 65-year-old individual living all by themself in a peaceful neighbourhood. Their insulin shots are over and they can’t procure it because they don’t want to step out. Their neighbour suggests your app and the elderly person downloads it. The signup process was simple through an OTP.
However, the problem starts now. They can’t seem to understand what to do with your app, how to look for their meds and how to place an order. They can’t even find a button to get in touch with customer service and try placing an order that way. Besides, they also can’t see most of the texts because they’re too small for the device and their vision. The text is also cluttered amidst visuals and graphics.
Within minutes, they get frustrated and abandon your app, promising never to come back to it again.
So, your app had this amazing opportunity to serve its intended purpose but thanks to indifference in designing, you just lost a customer for life. That’s how important empathy in design thinking is.
Where Does Empathy Fit Into Design?
Okay, I get it. Empathy is crucial and inevitable but where does it actually fit in?
That’s the problem. Empathy never fits in anywhere in the design process. It never has to because it is the fundamental element around which the entire app designing process should be structured in the first place. This is like asking how important is laying a foundation to construct a building. It simply starts with it.
This is one of the starting phases in design thinking, where a designer spends quality time understanding their users, their requirements, needs, desires, wants, objectives and more. This is the time to spend on understanding the emotional and psychological aspects of end users and use the insights to reverse engineer the design.
Through surveys, datasets, reviews and any data touchpoint, designers work on empathizing with their customers and eliminating any assumptions and biases they may have involuntarily developed over them. That’s why we started the guide with the phrase pride and prejudice.
How To Be A More Empathetic Designer?
There are different ways you could empathise with your customers and users. To help you kickstart your journey, here are some quick and effective suggestions.
Start Listening
As humans, we are too quick to judge and too late to realise. Well, this shouldn’t happen in designing anymore. To become a more empathetic designer, start listening to people more.
Listening is not the crux of the matter here. Listening with an open mind is. When you sit down to do your research, infer surveys or personally talk with your audience persona, leave all your assumptions, judgements and misconceptions behind and start interacting.
Be like an open canvas that is open to anything. When you do so, you’ll be surprised to find out how different your opinions and thoughts on some aspects were. As you start listening and paying attention, you will understand where they come from, their point of views, personal experiences that shaped their thought processes and more.
Become A Better Observer
One of the primary reasons for a lot of our misconceptions is our lack of observation. At one glance or instance, we tend to judge other people. However, the closer we look, the more details tend to surface to the top. That’s why you need to start observing people, situations and pain points better to resolve them more effectively in your designs.
When talking to people, record their conversations with consent to revisit the file for additional insights you might have missed. Look through images or videos, pay attention to surveys and patterns in them to uncover new facts and angles.
Do UX Research To Stay Ahead Of The Trend
Trends are traps. They put you in a template and force you to keep moving within the box in the pretext of staying in the trend. Trends are temporary and not permanent solutions to problems. It might give an initial flux of customers and attention but people will soon realize when something’s not working for them. That’s why you need to focus on ultimate user experiences, something that is timeless and universal.
Study UX from credible resources, read on approaching designing, look at how bigger companies have cracked their designs, observe the evolution of designing and more to get a strong grasp of the subject. You will involuntarily know what would work and what wouldn’t.
Define Scope And Goals
Once you start listening and observing people and elements, write down your inferences and understanding and use them to chart the goals and scope of your project. Use them as a roadmap to keep coming back to whenever you’re lost somewhere.
Defining goals and scope will help you give a tangible shape to an abstract concept you have in mind. It’ll help you visualize outcomes better or at least give you directions to your destination. Ask questions on whether your approach would precisely solve the problem, if your end users would find it relatable and more.
Study Facial Expressions
We as humans tend to communicate and convey a lot more nonverbally through our expressions and gestures. Some of the most powerful and poignant statements are made through the eyes or toes and one only needs to start paying attention to them to become a more empathetic designer.
Observe people’s facial expressions and start mimicking them. Researchers claim that mimicking expressions helps the brain connect with that emotion better and once an emotion is identified, it’s quite simple to work on it for problem-solving.
Why Empathy Mapping Is Crucial In Design Thinking
In your organization, you’re not the only designer working on an app or a product. You are part of a team, building a particular module or aspect of a product. So, it’s not enough if you’re the only one empathetic in your team.
Your entire team should be empathetic and more importantly, be on the same page on this. That’s where an essential tool called an empathy map comes into the picture.
Empathy maps are collaborative tools that allow you to share insights to all your team members. It paves the way for a uniformed understanding of emotions and objectives and aids in better designing.
Besides, empathy maps also help non-designers get involved and clear understanding of the process.
Empathy mapping involves four inevitable aspects, which every stakeholder should be aware of –
- What an individual says through interviews and answers to questionnaire
- What an individual thinks or imply through their actions, responses or gestures
- What an individual does through clicks, purchases, cart abandonments and more
- What an individual feels through their outcomes and their associated emotions such as frustration, satisfaction, disappointment and more
Wrapping Up
Empathy in design thinking is not only effective but interesting to understand and implement.
It makes you a better individual personally as well. Once you venture into this, you will start seeing differences in the way you approach your designs, incorporate color schemes, use typography and more.
Your entire workflow and visuals become more contextual and aligned to a higher cause. So, start becoming empathetic and let that reflect on every aspect of your design.
Good luck!
