Empathy is a crucial aspect of the design thinking process and is likely what makes this process so effective. First, empathy helps you connect with your end users. A connection between the two groups is necessary in order to create the most optimal solution. A good connection allows for idea transfer, critiques on prototypes, and useful communication. Empathy also helps you understand the group you are working with. Throughout my hands-on experience with the design process, my understanding of the groups helped me determine their pain points and struggles. This made me want to work harder to solve their problem because I understood their discomfort and need for a solution.
To create and harbor this relationship, it is important to be located in the environment of your end users. One benefit is that you are able to see where your solution will be implemented. Understanding this area is critical for your solution to be applicable as well as practical. Another reason is that you watch people interact with the environment. These interactions, both big and small, can help you create a better tailored product. A third reason, in relation to empathy interviews, is that people tend to be more comfortable in their own environment. This subtle relaxation causes interviewees to share more specific and more personal details. These details add key pieces to the ever-expanding puzzle that represents the problem. Throughout the empathy phase of design thinking, it is crucial to keep a beginner’s mindset. A beginner’s mindset is a state of mind where one removes a preconditioned bias about the topic at hand. This removal of bias is imperative to creating the best solution. If one already has an idea of the solution, they will miss important details. Their solution will not be the best match for their end users and will lose its potential. On the other hand, if one does start with a beginner’s mindset, they will have broadened their horizons and find a more efficient way to solve the problem. During the design studio, I went through the design thinking process. My team learned many important lessons as we tried to come up with the best solutions to the problem. One of the key lessons we learned was how to navigate conflicts to maintain momentum. We accomplished this task by ensuring that a level respect was always present in group meetings. It is vital that this respect always stands and is never broken because members must be willing to share their ideas without fear of judgement. If conflict does rise between two members, the situation is brought to the entire group where all our combined brainstorming can smooth out the issue. A lesson that I personally learned was how to set my ego aside and keep working when my group did not choose my idea. I accomplished this by separating my personal identity from my ideas. Once I did this, I was no longer troubled when someone else’s idea was chosen because I was able to see how my teammate’s idea was better. Also, I realized that if I bounced back, I could create better ideas that could benefit the team, rather than getting stuck on one idea. With this added productivity, my group could create a more fulfilling solution for the end users.
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Empathy is the first step of the design process and is a crucial component of human-centered design. Learning how to empathize is especially important to understand a person and their needs. Once you have successfully learned this skill, you can develop a solution more fit to the problem.
The most valuable tool that helped me conduct my interview was asking the question why. This question, while easy for me to ask, required the interviewee to think deeply about their previous answer. These in-depth thoughts benefited the team because they had more emotion attached to them, they contained more obvious body language, and they helped me obtain those “golden nuggets” of information. It was much harder to direct the interview than I had thought. First off, I found it hard to write vital information down while trying to connect with the person I was interviewing. I either wrote more information down and made less eye contact, or I started to connect with the person but wrote less words. Finding a balance between these two tasks is crucial in having a more user-focused interview. A solution to this problem is to only write essential elements on the empathy probe and leave the smaller details to my partners. Secondly, I had difficulty in asking questions that helped me get large, beneficial answers. I received surface level answers that contributed little to the empathy probe. I felt like I was asking the same questions and expecting different answers. I could solve this by writing more concise questions beforehand or by getting more practice. A third problem I had was that I tended to talk about events or facts rather than digging into feelings. I can solve this by focusing my questions to draw out feelings rather than simple facts and small conversations. Below is an empathy probe. |
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Scott Scholar Design Studio Internship: Summer of '22 Archives |