Empathy, Humanity, and Studying Context
What is empathic design
Empathic design is a design methodology that identifies users’ problems and latent needs which might be difficult to articulate while users are dealing with real tasks in their workplace.
How to draw on empathy, bring empathy into a methodology, or use empathy as an orientation in design?
It’s actually very hard for designers to figure out customers’ needs through laboratory studies. People are so adaptable to current conditions and always come up with “work-arounds” when facing inconveniences that they don’t even recognize their own needs. Apart from that, customers are also uncertain whether their needs can be fulfilled without deep understanding of technologies behind the system.
To address those difficulties, Leonard and Rayport introduced the five-step methodology of empathic design, including observation, capturing data, reflection and analysis, brainstorming for solutions, developing prototype of possible solutions. The core of empathic design is to observe your customers “actually use your product or service in their own physical environment” (Leonard & Rayport, 1997), so that customers are “much more eloquent than when talking in generalities” (Holtzblatt & Beyer, 1993).
The concept “Customer-centered design” introduced in Holtzblatt and Beyer’s paper, is very similar to empathic design. The primary concerns of customer-centered design are “how do I understand the customer” and “how do I ensure this understanding is reflected in my system” (Holtzblatt & Beyer, 1993). Contextual inquiries are techniques to get data from users in the context, and affinity diagrams as well as work modeling are techniques to ensure the functions and structures of the system are well designed to efficiently support users’ work.
Disadvantages & limits
However, what we concern is the cost and benefits of empathic design. First of all, emphatic designers seek to address users’ latent needs, “but users haven’t asked for that” (Leonard & Rayport, 1997). If users can not express their needs, it might mean their needs are not that crucial or urgent and they can live up to current conditions. Besides, companies also have to consider budget and time limit during design projects. Then should we spend time and money trying to refine the system design to implement functions they even didn’t ask for?
Second of all, during data collection phase, designers are supposed to sit with users, watch them do real tasks and ask questions. However, the work responsibility for one employee is quite specific, and the employee repeats similar tasks everyday, which means the problems faced by certain user might not be general problems faced by most users. Considering the limit amount of designers, they can only reach a few users. Therefore, even the aggregation of problems they collect may not be representative enough as references for design refinement.
References:
Leonard, D., & Rayport, J. F. (1997). Spark innovation through emphatic[sic] design. Harvard Business Review, 75(6), 102-113.
Beyer, H. & K. Holtzblatt (1998). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. New York: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Kaptelinin, V., Nardi, B. A., and Macaulay, C. (1999, July). Methods & tools: The activity checklist: a tool for representing the “space” of context. Interactions, 6 (4), 27-39.
Greenberg, S., Carpendale, S., Marquardt, N., & Buxton, B. (2011). Sketching user experiences: The workbook. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.