Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash
The very first step in the Design Thinking process is empathy. The terms empathy and sympathy are often treated interchangeably but they vary greatly. Sympathy is an understanding of what someone is feeling based on their own experiences. But with Design Thinking, you need to go much deeper than that. Empathy is when you put yourself into the other person’s shoes and try to understand why they are feeling the way they are, or why they are behaving a certain way. Understanding the why allows you to address the root of the issue with greater success in solving it.
UX designers have perfected many types of empathetic research strategies in order to find that root issue or emotion. They range anywhere from observing people, to interviews, to storyboarding.
Walk in Their Shoes
There’s a variety of names for this method but the ideas are all the same. Also known as “imagine-self perspective-talking,” the idea is to follow a routine that users would do with a current service or process. You will instantly find pain points, challenges, and perplexing steps that you can then confer with the user.
I use this often in my current position. I was working on redesigning a form for mileage reimbursement, with the goal of creating a cleaner layout. I had already spoken to a few users about what works and doesn’t work with the form. However, once I had to fill it out myself, I picked up on some other idiosyncrasies that I completely missed before.
Ethnography
Much like animal documentaries on nature channels, observing people in their environment can be eye opening. It allows you to see how people interact with the environment, objects, and each other. Sometimes, an individual doesn’t know they say or do something that could be a key detail to the solution (similar to how my friend told me I aggressively grab papers from her hand, to which my response was “no I don’t….do I?”)
I was developing a process for a department and had successfully launched it. However, there were a few people who were hitting the same roadblock. I decided to watch what they were doing and discovered that some people didn’t have a certain setting turned on, which would disrupt the whole process.
Cultural Probe
This one sounds a bit weird, but in a way it’s similar to ethnography. You’re still observing the person, but you give them a scenario which describes how they are to act with their environment or product. Then, the have to document the process by each step, adding insights and difficulties.
I’m actually excited to try this one out myself. We currently do something similar where we provide testing scenarios to several individuals and have them use that information to work their the process. We don’t have them write the steps, which is the part that I would really like to try.
References
Comments