What is the empathize phase in design?

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.

Understanding 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:

• Needs
• Motivations
• Emotions

Gathering data

To gather data in a manner that includes the users, designers usually go over the following steps:

• Conduct user interviews
• Conduct user and stakeholder surveys
• Review analytic data from existing products
• Make photo and video journals highlighting the users’ problems

Questions to ask the users

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.

• What: These questions help record details and facts related to the problem.
• How: These questions help understand the manner in which the user encountered the problem and what they did to try and solve it.
• Why: These questions help the design empathize with the user by understanding the motivations behind their actions, and the reason they’re looking for a particular feature.

Making sense of user data

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.