To recognize critical needs, we adopt the perspective of the user. This requires empathy. Our own thought patterns and principles can inhibit us, because we innovate not for ourselves but for the user. In an authentic environment and with empathy, the world can be experienced through the eyes of those people who will use our product or service day after day.
None of us wants to ask naive questions, which cause other people to roll their eyes. We might speak of the “pollo” effect in this context (pollo is Spanish for chicken). None of us wants to volunteer to be the chicken; however, this is often necessary to immerse oneself in the world of the user. Dare to ask questions because there are no naive questions.
How do we manage to keep an open mind?
It is important to ask questions with an open mind and put our personal experiences and values to the side as much as possible.
The best approach is to imagine that we are aliens in this world, apprentices from a strange galaxy. We have never been here before and we don’t know how people live here. Our lives are completely different, and everything we hear is new and inexplicable to us. As friendly extraterrestrial beings, we try to ask users questions in a nonbiased way. This way, we discover their world and their behavior as if it were completely new. As one would expect, the statements of the respondents are more differentiated this way because the role of apprentice is not threatening to the interviewee. On the contrary, in our experience, curiosity motivates potential users to tell us even more.
EXPERT TIP
Mindfulness as the basis of empathy and innovation success
Mindfulness is a basic capability of our brain, but our ambition to multitask makes us suppress this condition too often in our everyday lives. If we focus our attention purposefully, we are able to be more precise with our perception and be more present. Mindfulness may be directed both inward and outward. Empathy is best built up when we focus on the current moment, involve all our senses, and perceive the situation in an unprejudiced way. Mindfulness is the basis for enhanced cognitive skills and is a vital aspect of the design thinking mindset because it stimulates and promotes our creativity while cultivating our empathy and emotional intelligence. The things we experience with great enthusiasm and attention, we internalize better.
Why is it so hard for us to be empathetic?
It seems that society as a whole is getting increasingly incapable of empathy. This is probably because in our achievement-oriented society, we are exposed to a constant pressure to optimize ourselves. If our interlocutor seems strange and foreign to us, or if we have already sorted him into a certain category of people by our interpretations and conclusions, we will have a hard time empathizing with him. Other influencing factors also affect our empathetic behavior: a stressful everyday life; pressure to succeed; hectic situations; being wiped out; and emotional states such as anger, rage, and fear.
Behind these emotions, you usually find unfilled needs, unconscious beliefs, prejudices, and evaluation patterns. All this reduces our willingness to put ourselves in others’ shoes and ultimately blocks our empathy.
Mindfulness as the key to empathy:
Dare to change the perspective: Observe the world from the other side.
Give full attention to a topic: Be mindful, present, and precise.
Listen attentively and actively: Use looks, gestures, and facial expressions to be present.
Reflect on your own behavior: How do I come across to other people?
Read signals: What do the facial expressions, gestures, and voice of your interlocutor tell you?
Question your readiness for empathy: Is my opinion without prejudice?
Ask open questions: How might the future look?
Explore feelings and needs: How do you feel today?
Express your own feelings and needs: “I wish . . .”
Act with empathy: How can I help?
What types of empathy are there?
Empathy is important. Like everything else in life, we can break down this basic human trait into various stages. The terms “emotional intelligence” and “emotional empathy” are often used in this context. This intelligence of emotions is becoming more and more important, whether in product design, employee management, or in human relationships. It is the ability to perceive other people’s emotional sensitivities and respond to them adequately. While cognitive empathy merely allows us to recognize, in a first step, what another person feels, emotional empathy allows us to feel what the other person is feeling. The strongest form is when we suffer with the other person mentally and physically.
How can we train empathy and mindfulness in everyday life with the help of a talking stick?
The talking stick, adopted from Northwest American indigenous cultures, is a tool for empathy and attention. In a meeting, the talking stick is given to one person. This person explains his standpoint and keeps the talking stick until he feels the other participants in the meeting have understood him. The other participants listen or ask comprehension questions; otherwise they remain silent.
What is the benefit of the talking stick?
The talking stick promotes empathy because the other people in the room listen until they put themselves in the position of the speaker and are able to give the individual speakers the feeling that they have been understood. In everyday working life, this can yield vital benefits:
Members improve their ability to listen.
Being understood boosts the willingness to compromise.
Members’ ability to change perspective is nurtured and promoted.
Everybody gets a chance to speak and is allowed to finish what he has to say.
Only one person speaks at a time, which has a positive impact on acoustic comprehension.
Initially, this technique will demand more time in a meeting. As soon as the talking stick has been established, you will feel an increase in empathy.
EXPERT TIP
Empathy in UX design and the digital environment
In the digital environment, empathy has become a pivotal element for linking context with emotions. Usually, emotional states such as love, laughter, joy, surprise, sorrow, and anger are used. Facebook is a good example. Alongside the well-known “Like,” five other emoticons can be used. With the heart, users can express their love for things or persons; a smiley face is intended for funny contributions, and the wide-eyed emoticon stands for surprise. The two remaining emoticons stand for anger or sadness, either looking sternly at the world under a flushed forehead or crying.
With such emoticons, comprehensive data analyses on content can be carried out. So far, Like buttons have been integrated on product and service sites many, many times throughout the world. This data was only binary but has already yielded deep insights into user behavior and preferences. With emotional emoticons, services, products, and their users can be analyzed on an even more granular level. In the area of UX design, emoticons have another advantage: In many areas, users find it too burdensome to comment with a written text on a certain content, so a lot of content fades on the net without being rated. Emoticons can be easily entered on smart watches and mobile devices, which increases the comment rate considerably. Simplicity is becoming more and more pivotal!
Why does simplicity convince users?
Until 2012, dating sites consisted of nothing more than screens filled with profile pictures in grid design. Although targeted at the millennials (generation Y), this type of depiction did not meet their individual demands for flexibility, efficiency, and autonomy. Swipe right and swipe left changed our user experience fundamentally! The developers of Tinder wondered at the outset whether it made any sense at all to provide another service in this fiercely competitive segment. Their idea emerged from complaints received from the users of other dating sites. These users’ needs constituted the basis both for the design process and the selection of the features implemented.
Tinder’s entire concept is focused on the mobile user experience. Most functions of c
onventional dating platforms were purposefully omitted, and interaction options were reduced to a bare minimum.
Tinder is an example of three core properties of empathy in UX design:
1. Personal bond:
One picture per page and a simple interaction possibility ensures a personal and self-contained UX. The process is efficient, and the service can be called up anywhere. If there is an interest, it is even possible to obtain more information about the potential match with a click.
2. Motivation:
Because a match comes about only if both searchers signal their interest, users quickly undergo moments of happiness. Such moments have a strongly motivating impact and ensure long-term customer loyalty (hook effect; see Chapter 1.1).
3. Trust:
The chat function strengthens the trust of users in the app. The virtual date turns out to be not only surface sham—there is actually a possibility for users to arrange to meet for a quick coffee around the corner.
Good UX designers need to know how user groups come in contact with specific technologies and why they interact with them. For responding appropriately to users’ emotions, however, empathy is more important. Before beginning with the design of a product, we as designers must be in contact with the users in social networks or in the real world in order to get an authentic picture of their behavior and needs.
How can the love and passion for a product win over the users?
The credo of Lingscars.com is probably the opposite of simplicity. Ling Valentine lives for cars, for affordable leasing, and especially for her customers. Her start-up came into being in 2000 when she realized she was far more capable of operating the business than her husband. Her recipe for success is to let an emotional relationship emerge, which is of fundamental importance if you want to sell cars successfully. Most major leasing companies cannot offer this customer experience. To achieve that, Ling broke all design rules. Her Web site radiates powerful colors, different fonts, and unique graphics. This approach attracts hundreds of thousands of new users to the Web site every month. Lingscars.com was described by Management Today as “the most cluttered Web site we’ve ever seen.” She won awards for the ugliest Web site of all time and recognition for the large number of visitors. Ling is close to her customers, whether in stunts in which she appears or through her presence on blogs and the social networks.
Ling lives from viral marketing and the “word of mouth” of her satisfied customers. She addresses her customers directly. Her Chinese military truck—equipped with a huge rocket and the ad for Ling’s Cars—is a daily attraction for drivers passing it on the highway. She passes on her simple and cost-effective marketing 1:1 to her customers with attractive conditions. Her customers love her for it.
The cultural differences in the perception of design and how design thinking is used in the respective culture itself must always be taken into account.
KEY LEARNINGS
Build empathy with the user
Build empathy by understanding the actual needs and backgrounds of potential users.
Observe potential users without prejudice and in their actual environment.
Act like an extraterrestrial being who has entered a new galaxy for the first time.
Improve empathy by perceiving your own wishes, which in turn makes you more open to the needs of others.
Listening carefully is a crucial component of empathy. Pay attention to the body language (nonverbal communication) and probe if it seems to contradict what has been said.
Transfer emotions about contents from the digital world to reality by emoticons.
Draw conclusions from variations of the emoticons about users, their behavior, and their emotional relationship to content, products, and services.
Enhance user experience—even of a digital product—through the empathy you have built up.
Make sure that all parties involved in the development phase (e.g., UX) are already dealing actively with users’ wishes.
Pay heed to the cultural context in UX because it can strongly affect how the user perceives the offer.
1.6 How to find the right focus
By way of introduction, we already pointed out in Chapter 1.2 that the hardest thing is to determine the point of view (in short: PoV). Therefore we would like to introduce tools and methods that make this step easier.
Peter, Lilly, and Marc are frequently faced with the challenge of having to find a solution not only for one group of people but also one that is relevant to a multitude of different users or customers. In such cases, it is decisive to assume a 360° view.
In principle, empathy with a potential user is an important integral part when preparing the ideation phase; it also reminds us of our limits. Empathy is vital not only for selecting the right community but also for the way in which we pose the right questions during this phase. The questions should prompt interviewees to put themselves in different situations and consider them from different points of view.
What might the sequence for this look like? It starts with formulating the problem; then comes the definition of the relevant points of view, which ultimately leads to the questions being answered within the set framework.
Up to now, we have concentrated on developing a product for a single group of people or users and emphasized how important empathy is. Now we want to go one step further and solve a problem for a wide range of users. The concrete procedure is described on page 81.
In our experience, the following approach is suitable for obtaining a good PoV.
A) Analyze information
Collection, interpretation, and analysis of all information.
Summary and consolidation of key findings into insights.
B) Infer insights
Summarize the 10 most important insights.
Infer the design principles or problem clusters from it.
C) Formulate possible questions
Mark possible key themes or questions (e.g., dot voting on insights and principles).
Choose three thematic areas and formulate the question.
D) Specify questions
Present, discuss, and select a question.
Refine and improve the question.
How might we solve problems for a wide range of users and address their needs?
We have had good experience with a 360° view of a question.
Let’s take a need of our persona, Lilly. Lilly wants to marry Jonny. They plan their wedding party together. They do not yet know how the wedding party should look. So the problem statement is:
Lilly and Jonny don’t know yet how their wedding party should look.
The question derived from this would be:
“What should Lilly and Jonny’s wedding party look like?”
Based on this, the stakeholders and points of view are defined:
“Suppliers and the budget, for instance, are important when you plan a wedding.”
Before we search for specific ideas, the ideation phase must be well prepared. As we have learned in the previous chapters, we are dealing with the divergent phase here, meaning nothing else than that the horizon is broadened and new ideas are searched for. To allow for this, we consider the problem from as many different perspectives as possible (i.e., from a 360° view), starting with the question.
As shown by way of example in the table, the points of view range from “money” to “age.” A rough differentiation is made between the stakeholders and other points of view. Of course, the number of possible points of view is infinite—hence the selection presented here is only an example. Note that if a stakeholder map exists (see Chapter 3.4, p. 258), it can also be used as a starting point.
Back to our actual problem statement: the wedding party. We want to identify the relevant points of view and reflect upon the question of which stakeholders and which other points of view might be relevant for the question of Lilly and Jonny. As shown in the table, it is useful to define the points of view and their intentions. This makes it easier
to share the points of view with other participants.
Stakeholders
Customers
- Loyal customers
- Occasional customers
- Noncustomers
Partners
- Suppliers
- Lenders
- Sponsors
Employees
- Long-standing employees
- Employees with expertise
- Critical employees
- Apprentices
Government institutions
- Municipality
- Social services
- Local employment office
Residents
- Private households
- Other companies or shops
Competition
- Direct competition
- Indirect competition
Other points of view
Time
- Past
- Present
- Future
Money
- Without money
- With a lot of money
Imaginary world
- On another planet
- In a fairytale
- In a movie
The Design Thinking Playbook Page 8