Solutions Are Designed for People
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective, experiences and feelings.
In IT, this matters because we rarely build technology simply for the sake of technology. We build systems, services and processes for people who are trying to accomplish something.
A technically perfect solution can still fail if it does not solve the user’s real problem.
When working on an IT solution, useful questions include:
- Why does this person need our help?
- What are they actually trying to achieve?
- What makes the current experience difficult?
- What assumptions are we making about them?
- What does the user see that we do not see from inside the IT organization?
Empathy helps us move from:
What should we build?
toward:
What problem is this person actually trying to solve?
Empathy and Design Thinking
Empathy is a central principle of human-centered design and Design Thinking.
Instead of beginning with a predetermined solution, we first try to understand the people affected by the problem. In the Stanford d.school framework, this is represented by the Empathize mode.
This can involve:
- talking to users;
- observing how they actually work;
- asking them to demonstrate a real task;
- listening for frustrations and workarounds;
- comparing what people say with what they actually do;
- questioning our own assumptions.
The goal is not simply to collect requirements.
It is to understand the context behind those requirements.
For example, a user might ask:
Can you add another button to this application?
The request tells us what the user thinks the solution should be.
Empathy encourages us to ask:
What are you trying to achieve when you need this button?
The real need may have a completely different solution.
How to build empathy with your user?
To master the quality of empathy, you must do the following:
- Develop the virtue of patience – so you can listen for the user’s point of view.
- Ideally, observe users in their natural environment.
- Adopt a novice mindset when interacting with the user.
- Let go of your initial assumptions and beliefs when observing users so you can perceive their actions with a novice mindset.
- If doing user research is not possible, visualize yourself in the users’ environment or facing the same situations they face.
- Resonate with your users’ subjective world.
- Refrain from judging users.
- Do not urge to think of a fix for a problem during research. Concentrate only on empathic listening until you’ve completed your research.
Empathizing with your users, lets you put aside your assumptions and gain unanticipated insights.
How to Use an Empathy Map
An empathy map is a collaborative visualization that helps a team organize what it knows about a particular type of user.
Below you will find questions to be answered during customer interview and observation sessions.
What is the customer (persona) thinking and feeling?
- What is the customer concerned about or afraid of?
- Is the customer satisfied? Why or why not?
- What are his priorities, dreams, and aspirations?
- What causes an emotional reaction for the customer?
What is the customer hearing?
- What or who influences the customer?
- Is your customer easy to influence?
- Where does the customer get their information?
- What information channel does your customer use the most?
What is the customer seeing?
- Does your customer spend more time in the public or in private?
- What does your customer’s environment look like?
- How does the customer interact with their environment?
What is the customer saying and doing?
- How does the customer portray themselves in front of others?
- Words he uses when talking?
- Information withhold or leave out when sharing with others?
- What is the gap between what they say and how they act?
What are the customer’s pains?
- What obstacles does the customer need to overcome?
- Why hasn’t the customer been able to reach their goals?
- What frustrations are on the horizon for the customer?
What does the customer gain?
- What methods does the customer use to achieve success?
- How a success measured and what does it look like?
- What are the short and long term goals of the customer?
A mind map is an excellent tool complimenting your journey to successful problem-solving.
A Simple IT Example
Imagine an internal IT team receives many tickets saying:
VPN doesn’t work.
From the IT side, this looks like a technical reliability problem.
But after observing several users, the team discovers that the VPN usually works correctly.
Employees are uncertain whether the connection has been established because the status indicator is difficult to understand.
The initial problem was:
VPN reliability.
The problem discovered through user observation is:
Users need clear confirmation that they are securely connected.
Those two problem definitions can lead to completely different solutions.
This is why empathy is useful in IT.
It helps us avoid solving the problem we assume users have instead of the problem they actually experience.
