Empathy beyond users

We live in a world where having an opinion is easy. Listening is harder. Whether at work, in a social gathering, or somewhere online, we are surrounded by strong opinions about what should be done, why it should be done, and how it should be done. We often enter conversations with our conclusions already formed, listening less to understand and more to find the moment when we can make our point. So, is empathy on the decline? That is a much bigger question than I am qualified to answer. And frankly, that isn't what this article is about. I'm interested in something smaller, but much closer to my world as a designer: the role empathy plays in design, and why our definition of it may be too narrow.

We talk a lot about empathy in UX. Be in the user's shoes. Understand their pain points. Learn their behaviors. Don't design for yourself. All good advice and by now, almost a common sense.

But there is another side of empathy that we don't talk about nearly as much.

The user isn't the only person whose perspective a designer needs to understand.

Products are built by teams. Product managers have goals and priorities. Engineers work within technical realities. Marketing teams think about positioning and acquisition. Business leaders have financial and strategic constraints. Sales and business development teams hear things from customers that designers may never hear directly.

Each sees the product through a different lens.

And good design rarely comes from proving that one of those perspectives is right and the others are wrong. It comes from understanding enough of each perspective to find a path forward.

That, to me, is where empathy becomes much more interesting.

So, what does empathy really means?

The Oxford Learner's Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand another person's feelings or experiences. Psychology Today expands on this idea by describing empathy as experiencing another person's point of view rather than only our own.

The important phrase here is another person's point of view.

As UX designers, we are encouraged and often rewarded for being problem solvers. We learn to think on our feet, make sense of ambiguity, generate ideas, and turn complicated problems into tangible solutions. There is a danger hidden inside that strength.

When you become good at solving problems, you can become too eager to solve them.

Someone describes a problem and our mind immediately starts designing. We see a workflow and start rearranging it. A stakeholder raises a concern and we're already thinking about how to address it / or even defending what we have and why it works.

But before problem solving comes something much less glamorous: Listening.

Not listening so we can respond. Listening so we can understand. No successful product stands on design alone. As I said earlier, products are created by teams, for people, within a web of technical, business, organizational, and market realities. If we want to create something meaningful, we have to understand those realities rather than treat them simply as obstacles to our design.

Empathy, then, isn't only about feeling what the user feels. It is about developing the curiosity to understand why someone sees the problem differently than you do.

One important thing to note here, understanding someone's perspective doesn't mean agreeing with it. That distinction matters.

When should we practice it?

Well, that is a wrong question to even ask. As designers, most of us follow some variation of a design process: discover, define, explore, design, validate, deliver. Empathy is often placed near the beginning.

• Research the user,

• Understand the problem,

• Design the solution,

• And move on to execute it.

I think that's a mistake. Empathy isn't a stage in the design process. It is a behavior throughout the design process.

• During discovery, empathy helps us understand the user without prematurely deciding what their problem is.

• During definition, it helps us reconcile competing interpretations of what we learned.

• During exploration, it allows us to consider solutions through multiple lenses not only desirability, but feasibility and viability.

• During design reviews, it helps us hear criticism without immediately defending our work.

• During engineering conversations, it helps us distinguish between resistance and legitimate technical constraints.

• During stakeholder conversations, it helps us uncover the goal hiding underneath the requested feature.

  
  

Being willing to discover that we were wrong. That may be the most underrated form of empathy in design.

The designer as a bridge

I've come to think that one of the most valuable roles a designer can play on a team, it isn't simply being the "voice of the user." It is being a bridge between perspectives.

Our job as designers is not always to decide which voice, user, or engineer, or product, or any other stakeholder you interact with wins. Sometimes... actually no, I would say most of the time, our greatest contribution is helping everyone understand what the other voices are actually saying. This requires curiosity, listening before solving, asking why one more time when we think we already know the answer.

Empathy means understanding the problem from somewhere other than where you are standing.