Guiding questions from Jared Spool
When setting out to create a great UX experience keep these 4 questions from Jared Spool in mind:
- Whose life are you trying to improve?
- What will that improvement look like?
- How will you know you've improved it?
- How will you prevent making anyone's life worse?
To answer the first question we need to understand our audience. The first phase in the design thinking process is called “The empathy phase”. “Empathize with the user” is often repeated and misused in the UX process to the point of being cliché. It is treated like an activity where we imagine ourselves in the same situation as our audience. It is worth returning to the UX adage: 'You are not your user.' Simply imagining yourself in someone else’s situation is not going to allow you to empathize with them.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines empathy as follows:
The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner also: the capacity for this
Our ability to empathize with someone is directly connected to our ability to imagine ourselves in their situation, with their same values, motivations, experiences, and personality.1 However, because our ability to imagine is limited by our experiences; our ability to empathize is also limited by our own experiences.2 Therefore, in order to more completely empathize with our users, we need to conduct user research.
1. Activating episodic simulation increases affective empathy
2. The future of memory: Remember, imagining and the brain
Our ability to empathize is limited by our own experiences.
Researching to understand your audience is foundational to the empathy phase of the design thinking process. Empathizing with your user is a call to reflect on your user’s needs, values, motivations as uncovered by research. Researching to understand your audience will help get you closer to empathy and allow you to design better solutions.
Diversity & compassion
In addressing Jared Spool’s first and fourth questions: whose life are we trying to improve and how will we prevent making anyone’s life worse, it’s imperative that research and testing include the diversity of your audience or you risk further marginalizing under-represented groups. Concordia’s community is rich in diversity including various cultures, ethnicities, genders, generations and neurodiversity to name a few.
Avoiding biases
Regardless of the research that we do to understand our audience, we need to be aware of our own biases, as these can lead us to make assumptions or having gaps in knowledge that we are unaware of and can impact the experiences we create for others. Take the Harvard Implicit Association tests to find out what yours might be.
Compassion & action
Empathy is passive; it calls us to feel, not to act. Great UX is an act of creation and more akin to compassion.
Compassion is a relationship between equals.
Compassion compels us to ask “how can we help?” 1
It’s an important reminder not to assume that we know but to recentre and empower our audience to help us understand.
1. Four Reasons Why Compassion is Better for Humanity than Empathy
