I watched the beautifully animated RSA short video on Empathy by Brené Brown a while ago and it made an impact on me. Dr. Brown’s video highlights how as humans we are hardwired for connection and how ‘Empathy fuels connection.’ That it is about dropping judgement (and opinion) and recognising what the other person is feeling by looking at things from their perspective.
Empathy is not only fundamental from interpersonal context, but also key for better engaging employees and for brands to build strong connections with consumers. Although Empathy is not a commonly discussed topic in corporate setting, it’s important to have these conversations so that automation/AI don’t dominate as the only focus areas for transforming organisations. People are at the heart of every organisation and humanizing interactions is essential.
Interestingly, Empathy is also the first step in the design thinking process. But, is empathy only available for those that are emotionally aware? Why is it difficult to get this right when designing experiences or building products? Is having a cognitive knowledge of empathy enough, how best to put this in practice?
Dr. Brown says rarely does a response make something better, what makes something better is ‘connection’. Empathy as a skill is quite difficult to put in practice because we are either time starved or have our own preconceived opinions (let’s call it experiences) that we’d love to offer. We tend to focus a lot on gathering user requirements, but not spend enough time to understand the underlying ‘why’. WHY do customers feel and do what they do? I agree that it’s not very simple to answer that question, but we can make some effort in gaining some insights in that direction.
Instead of only building customer target groups and profiles, we could dig deeper into customer emotions — think, feel and see from the eyes of the customers so we can understand a lot about our users through empathetic experiences, who knows we may even discover uncovered areas/pain points. Think beyond a cross functional group with a lot of post-it notes in a workshop setting, but observing users, understanding their experiences by directly engaging with them.
You can already see how this practice can help business leaders improve employee engagement by connecting with employee pain points.
I find that building empathy maps very helpful in the process of user understanding, and many of the insights can even support building better customer journey maps. Empathy maps are valuable to share across the organisation (not just amongst the UX folks) to have a common understanding of the user and as a way of balancing the rational and emotional experiences. How else can we build better customer experience without these insights?
A key skill to actively engage and empathise with the user is ‘listening’. It is hard to put into practice because we are so quick to offer solutions or express our opinion, if not us who knows better about our users? Empathy involves a lot of patience — to listen, not directly offer opinion and pass judgement. Bringing the technique of ‘active listening’ from therapy training into user research has been very helpful for me personally to connect cognitively and to understand nonverbal cues when speaking to users. Are there other techniques that others use that they have found helpful?
While Empathy and practice of design thinking cannot alone fix all the organisational problems it can help build better products and services. I would be interested to hear research studies and practical examples of the strong correlation between empathy and analytics.
This article was previously published on Linkedin.
