For a design to be successful, it needs to resonate with the user. To achieve this, it is important that the users are a part of the design process. The first phase of this process in design thinking is to empathize with the user.
The first step is to understand the user by putting yourself in their shoes. The designer needs to figure out more about the user, such as:
To gather data in a manner that includes the users, designers usually go over the following steps:
To get information from users, it is important to make sure that the asker’s bias does not convolute the data. Instead of asking leading questions, it is better to ask open-ended questions that induce the user’s true emotions and feelings to come to the surface.
Good interviewers know when to reign in the conversation if it starts getting off-track, while keeping the interviewee comfortable. Asking ‘what’, ‘how’, and/or ‘why’ questions helps the interviewer dive into their observations and derive deeper levels of understanding.
The next step in the empathize phase is to make sense of the user’s data. To do so, the designer creates personas around the users they gathered the data from. The personas do not necessarily have to be the interviewees. They usually showcase an imaginary person who has the characteristics common in a group of people.
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