It’s all about EMPATHY!

Empathy is at the heart of design.

Empathy helps us achieve a much deeper understanding of people’s emotional and physical needs and how they see, live and understand the world, how they interact with it, what they lack. It also helps us understand how this has an impact on their lives, and in particular in research contexts. Doing research on an empathic basis deals with (and worries) their motivations, thoughts, because for example they prefer to do one thing rather than another.

Given its importance, empathizing is in fact the first phase of the Design Thinking process. In this phase, the goal is to gain a visceral understanding of the people you are designing for and the problem you are trying to solve for them. This process involves observation, involvement and empathy with the people you are designing for in order to understand them, to understand the challenges involved. In essence, we need to abandon PCs and data, and talk directly to users. In this actual journey, process, it will be possible to deepen the daily life of users, what their difficulties are, what goals they want to achieve, how the product can solve their problem, how they use the product and how they feel when they use it. Sharing, empathizing and involving the user in this process will need a great capacity for observation, why? Because that person will never tell us what and who he really is, what he really misses, what he wants, but rather what he would be, who he would be and what he would dream of who they would like to be. He will sell you an image of himself that is dreamed of, distorted, not real; this is why empathy is essential, to see and understand where the answers we really want are.

This phase absolutely requires you to put your assumptions aside. Unfortunately, it is human nature to assume that others will think and feel like us in specific situations, but of course this is not (always) the case. Or rather, in the sharing phase they can be put on the plate, a note, but nothing more, or they will inevitably condition all the work.

Who are your users?
What is their lack?
How can their experience with the product be improved?
KNOW

EMPATIZES

DO SEARCH

and LOG OUT: you are not your users.