Empathy in UX Design

• Empathy in UX design connects designers with users, enabling understanding of their needs and problems.
• Designers proactively empathize with users to refine research plans before formal research begins.
• Empathy exercises involve using imagination and perspective-taking skills to anticipate user experiences, so designers can develop better interview questions.

User Profiles vs. User Personas

• User profiles are short, fictional biographies that aid with informal empathy exercises.
• User personas are more formal, representing common user characteristics distilled from interviews.
• User personas stand in for larger groups of similar users throughout the design process.

Interview Goals and Questions Example for Zia's Pizza App

• Interview goals include understanding challenges in managing busy schedules and meal planning.
• Interview goals also include identifying frustrations in the restaurant ordering process.
• Example interview questions: "What is your current schedule like? How do you balance your responsibilities with meal planning?" and "How often do you order meals from a restaurant? When you do, what is your motivation?"

User Profile: Reena

• Reena is a 37-year-old paramedic from Lakewood, Colorado, who lives mostly alone with a teenage daughter.
• She works variable day and night shifts and is a rock climber.
• She has dyslexia, making it difficult for her to quickly read and process information.
• Reena is health- and budget-conscious.

Pre-Interview Empathy Exercise

• Designers anticipate participant responses and identify how user needs, challenges, and concerns might be addressed.
• This involves imagining how a user like Reena might answer interview questions.
• The designer uses perspective-taking to anticipate opinions, experiences, and pain points.
• Bullet points and incomplete sentences can be used to record thoughts during empathy exercises.
• Responses in empathy exercises come from the designer imagining how a user like Reena might respond.

Refined Interview Questions

• Empathy exercises validate research plans, including interview goals and questions.
• Designers re-evaluate interview questions, considering potential user reactions and biases.
• Example: Rephrasing "What challenges do you face in the ordering process?" to "What is the ordering process like for you? Tell me about the experience you have with ordering and how it makes you feel."

Optional Empathy Exercises

• Strengthen empathy by conducting empathy exercises with fictional user profiles relevant to a design project.
• Consider conducting interviews with real people for early insights.
• Develop an interview plan with research goals and questions.
• Complete four empathy exercises or interviews.

Organizing Data and Envisioning Common Solutions

• Analyze data from empathy exercises or interviews.
• Identify commonalities across user profiles or interview participants.
• Consider features to incorporate into the design that will work for a variety of users
• Prioritize user concerns and problems to determine which features to build into the app.
• A system in the app where users can “favorite” certain restaurants and then find them easily later, would be useful.

Key Takeaways

• Pre-interview empathy exercises help imagine user responses and refine questions.
• Empathy is for refining and executing your approach to every phase of the design process, including user interviews.