Member-only story
In UX, build Team Empathy
How soft skills can expand our ability to thrive in the UX environment
In the post-pandemic world, much has changed about our work places. We have mastered the art of zooming, the art of meeting on camera anywhere and anytime, and the art of insightful messaging.
We’ve set up work cocoons at home, whereever we found a nook of privacy. We’ve invested in internet upgrades, and possibly even hooked up extra super monitors to our laptop. We’ve learned a great deal of new hard skills!
Our understanding of team structure has also expanded exponentially. We are plugged in with colleagues hundreds of miles away, in different zime zones and countries. Team work is more crucial than ever.
But what about our empathy skills?
Empathy, kindness, generosity, compassion, and wisdom are all qualities great leaders develop in their lives and careers. These soft skills come with practice, experience, and exposure to the unexpected.
By definition, empathy embodies the ability to not only share another person’s motivations, goals, preferences, delights, but also mirroring their pain points, needs, frustrations, complaints, difficulties, obstacles, fears, anxieties, inabilities, and disappointments.
In other words, UX designers need to fully understand a wide-ranging spectrum of users’ feelings and moods without being influenced by our own point of view. For that, we need to access our empathetic mind as a tool to understand our users’ stories.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates
How does empathy fit into the emotional universe?
Empathy is large and complex. It embraces a solution-defining approach to solve user problems. Empathy mirrors users’ pain points and engages in the process to develop and refine products and services to remove such pain points.
Empathy is much bigger than sympathy. Empathy can bring real change to where it’s needed to most.
