The concept of empathy seems easy enough to comprehend. In fact, my ten-year-old had no trouble volunteering the definition of empathy to me as I prepared a short speech about how she needs to be more patient with her sister.
“I’ve been hearing all about it since second grade, mom!” she chortled as I expressed surprise.
Naturally, I felt out-smarted.
What is Empathy?
Empathy is the ability and willingness to step into someone else’s shoes in order to not only feel their pain points, fears, and limitations, but to also develop a full appreciation for their hopes, aspirations, and goals.
With respect to UX, the empathy drives the desire to create products and services that can positively impact the experience of users.
The Three Types of Empathy
According the psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman, there are three types of empathy:
- Cognitive empathy,
- Emotional empathy, &
- Compassionate empathy
I’ll briefly touch upon the types of empathy below because each type of empathy plays a significant role in understanding users and catering to their needs. In fact, in order to arrive at compassionate empathy, one has to tackle cognitive and emotional empathy. So, in a way, all three types of empathy are tied closely together.
Cognitive empathy:
Cognitive empathy involves making educated guesses about the pain points and frustrations that someone else might be experiencing. This is the first crucial step towards leaning in and trying to fully accommodate and meet the challenges faced by the target audience.
Emotional empathy:
Emotional empathy encourages us to look inwards in order to relate to the frustration experienced by others. For example, seeing someone absentmindedly step on a piece of lego can cause us to wince. In other words, the situation automatically elicits an emotional physical response. The sensation of pain can almost be felt momentarily in a situation like this.
Compassionate empathy:
Compassionate empathy connects cognitive and emotional empathy and propels us to take action, if needed. It places us in a state where we feel compelled to help the person who is experiencing pain. At the same time, the desire to extend a solution to the problem is rather measured, meaning we do not jump to the solution-centered phase because we are not overcome by the floodgates of emotion.
Research: The First Step Towards Cognitive Empathy in UX
The design-thinking process involves the crucial first step of empathizing with your users. The best way to ensure a way into the user mindset so you can develop a thorough understanding of their viewpoints, goals, limitations, and frustrations is to carry out user research.
Cognitive empathy allows researchers to lay a solid groundwork. In order to develop educated guesses about hindrances experienced by users, it is important to observe the processes involved in the completion of tasks. This type of research has to occur in the user’s natural environment so that biases are kept at bay. Moreover, it has to occur at the onset of project planning to make sure that the research progresses in the right direction and covers all the potential users of a product or service.
The second step in moving cognitive empathy along is to validate your observations and ideas with prospective users on a continuous basis. Nothing good can come out of developing a full plan based on personal observations if it goes unverified in the early stages of the research process. Users need to remain involved every step of the way because they understand the limitations of the current product or process best.
Conducting user tests are the natural next step in the process of determining whether a product/process meets the mark. Remember, design-thinking is not a linear process. The back-and-forth shift from research to prototype development and testing is the name of the game.
Sure, the process of developing solutions can easily get prolonged by the back-and-forth. However, it is important to remember that during each step of the process cognitive empathy solidifies.
The Take-Away
We cannot underestimate the role of cognitive empathy in UX design and research. Without understanding the depth of problems experienced by end-users there is no way for us to devise appropriate solutions. Cognitive empathy allows researchers to observe and verify the various steps involved in undertaking a process. This gives them the opportunity to (hopefully) accurately nail problems.
The end goals is to design a process that eliminates the issues users encounter and to improve their experience. Overlooking this goal would result in users abandoning the product and moving onto a solution offered by your competitor.
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