Author: Sara McGuyer

Why Empathy?

For many years, SmallBox has started our major projects with what we’ve called a “Discovery” phase. This is an essential first step because we’ve learned from experience that our ideas, designs, and project outcomes are all stronger when we go through an intentional research process. To do our best work, we need to empathize before solving.

What is Empathy?

em·pa·thy
     Noun
     the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Sometimes called design research, or an empathy phase in a human-centered design process, this focus is all about understanding the experience, perspective and emotions of your audiences, then applying what you’ve learned to your services or products.

Here’s the design thinking process we use at SmallBox:

steps of the design thinking - empathize, frame, ideate, prototype and test

But in reality it looks more like this:

Nonlinear depiction of design thinking process

While the process is non-linear and can move back and forth from one phase to another, it always starts with empathy. And for good reason.

Why is empathy important?

Empathy leads to…

  • Greater understanding of the people you serve.
  • Dispelled assumptions and biases about how and why people interact with your service or product.
  • Creating more meaningful solutions that are more readily adopted.
  • Becoming more responsive to audience needs.
  • Operating your business in a human way.

Conducting design research to truly empathize with people may seem like it takes a lot of time, or slows down your process. It’s seductive to just jump in and start solving right away. However, the time spent up front can save a lot of time later. Without really understanding your audience needs, you could waste resources creating a new offering that doesn’t resonate or actually meet those needs.

Having your audiences take part in the process from start to finish fosters buy-in for both the cause and the solution. It allows for transparency that ultimately creates shared understanding and a wider variety of potential solutions.

Listening and observing can help you discover unmet needs and possibilities you never knew existed. You might miss a huge opportunity that someone else eventually spots and acts on.

How to get started

Here are some basic first steps to incorporating empathy into your work:

  • Identify groups of people who are critical to your success. This might be your team, your customers, or key partners. You may already have strong awareness of who your audiences are and know how to reach them – if so, you’ve got a head start!
  • Ask yourself what you don’t know know about the people you care about. Are you basing everything you know off of one thing one person said five years ago? Sometimes it is hard to be honest with ourselves. We have cognitive biases that help us confirm long held opinions. Step back, take a critical look at what you think you know about your audiences, and make note of any assumptions you are making.
  • You can start simply with listening. Interviewing is a foundational skill for empathy research. Use your assumptions list to create a bank of questions to prepare for interviewing your audiences. Make sure to approach these conversations with curiosity and a commitment to staying neutral (remember those cognitive biases we mentioned earlier?). What you can learn through a series of thoughtful, objective interviews can be eye opening.
  • Tap into the power of observation. If you have never watched people interact with your product or service, make a point to do so. Observation can paint a whole new picture – sometimes showing things we might never know to ask, or a person might not think to bring up in an interview.

While there are many advanced and creative empathy research methods – everything from contextual inquiry to diary studies – it’s okay to start with basics.

What does it look like?

illustration of ice cream scoops by sara mcguyer

In the book Creative Confidence, co-authors Tom and David Kelley mention a scenario of researching how to improve the ice cream scoop. Most people, when asked to talk through their process, shared the basics of how they used the scoop to get ice cream – get the scoop out of a drawer, warm it with water, start on one far side of the container and scoop toward the other, etc. But most people failed to mention that they licked the scoop before tossing it into the sink. It was either an unconscious thing, or they didn’t feel it was important enough to mention. By engaging in empathy research and observing people in action as they scooped ice cream, this detail emerged.

Having moving parts (as some scoops do) becomes a lot less desirable. Without empathy, they would have missed this detail all together, and maybe built the wrong kind of scoop. Getting to these details, as mentioned earlier, is why empathy is so important and useful.

The more I practice empathy research, the more I see it as a gift that keeps on giving. More depth in understanding about your audiences. Greater insights in how to serve them. A more informed, human-driven experience or product designed to elicit a positive response from the people who matter the most – your audiences, customers and employees!

What is Design Thinking?

If you frequent publications like Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal for the latest business trends, you’ve probably read something about design thinking. Organizations like Ford, Walgreens, and Planned Parenthood have used this methodology to solve major challenges and design new products, services, and experiences. 

This process is increasingly adopted to solve a wider range of problems, and it can serve as a wonderful antidote to rampant silos and lack of collaboration plaguing modern organizations. I have a theory that on the other side of the silo trend we’ll see collaboration emerge as a permission-to-play value for businesses seeking to innovate, but I digress…

For those who haven’t tried it, the process can sound initimidating. People often ask: Do I need to be a graphic designer? Is this just another business buzz word? What is design thinking anyway?

Here’s our basic definition:

Design thinking is a creative, iterative approach to problem-solving that places humans at the center of the process.

The process is often broken down into distinct steps or phases. While different models have varying labels, they cover the same basics. Our approach looks like this:

Design thinking process by SmallBox

Empathy

The process starts with understanding. Empathy is all about tapping into the perspectives of the people you serve to get to the heart of the problem, which will ultimately inform more meaningful solutions.

Frame

This step is about clearly defining the opportunity to get everyone solving from a point of shared understanding. Through your empathy research, you will have uncovered a ton of data. Framing is essentially sense-making – finding themes and patterns from what you’ve collected.

Ideate

This phase is about exploring and thinking broadly about the challenge. The goal is to generate a wide range of potential solutions. Ideation often includes a combination of diverging and converging, or having people work independently, then together. In this way, people can build on one another’s ideas.

Protoype

Prototyping is about building out models of your ideas to see how those solutions work. You might have quick and simple models, or something more detailed and complex – sometimes referred to as low and high fidelity. The important this is getting something “real” enough to let people interact with the prototype.

Test
For this step, you ask people to experiment with your prototype to see how it actually works in real life. These interactions can illuminate areas for improvement and iteration. 

Keep in mind, these steps don’t always occur in a linear fashion – sometimes it is necessary to go back to a step, or to work on two concurrently. But it does always start with empathy.

To-may-toe / To-mah-toe

While some may say it’s just semantics, I actually prefer the term human-centered design over design thinking for a couple of reasons. One of the core tenets of this approach is to put people at the center of the process. Mentioning people in the name honors that important aspect. “Thinking” might also confuse people or misrepresent what really happens. The process isn’t about simply brainstorming or theorizing. It is very active, helping you bring ideas to life – not just dream them up.

No matter what you call it – human-centered design is a great process for breaking down and solving big, fuzzy challenges. Want to learn more? Join us for a human-centered design workshop!