Empathy is the foundation of solid UX research
Listen, empathize, and empower
Listen, empathize, and empower. These skills allow UX designer to draw wisdom, insight, and creativity from their users interviews.
To listen is to encourage users to express their concerns and pain points in their words, to empathize means that you are understanding and learning about the users’ difficulties, and to empower means that the product will provide the user with what they need to alleviate or even solve their pain points.
Accessing users’ pain points with empathy
Most importantly, cultivating empathy in the research phase means that, as UX designers, we step away from assumptions and guesses about our users’ stories and pain points. Rather, we are gathering research data based on real user input based on their stories and insights.
A real-world example
We are building an app to track accessibility to urban, pedestrian-only zones around the world. As UX designer, how can we identify our users’ most pressing pain points and their ultimate needs?
Let’s draw up a simple overview of a pedestrian zone in an urban space.
