Design thinking as a human-centered method is an approach that tries to discover and also answer the needs and demands of users.
Accordingly, at the various social, functional, and valuable levels.
Hence, the empathy process begins with recognition, analysis, and user scrutiny.
This stage is the basis of the design thinking and the next steps will be ridden on the infrastructure called empathy.
This reflects the importance of the presence and implementation of this stage in businesses.
what does Empathy mean in design thinking?
Empathy is a process that involves the audience as the main and most important influential factor in the process of discovery and demand.
In this process, the user, as a member of the problem-solving team, is unknowingly helping.
To find the best and simplest possible solution.
In this section, the user is discovering problems and weaknesses as a temporary member of the Design Thinking Team.
Design thinking believes that its inter-specialized team requires the presence of people from outside the organization.
Moreover, who is better than the group of users who have been in touch with their services or product?
Empathy means that the research team puts itself in the audience’s shoes and looks at problems and issues from their perspective.
In other words, in the empathy process, the research team sees the issue from the user’s point of view.
And in this way injects a new perspective into the team.
ways of reaching the user’s point of view:
There are different ways to reach the audience’s point of view.
Conversation techniques, questioning, seeing and recording customer behavior while using the product, photography, etc are various methods.
This method helps the design thinking team to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their product or service.
Usually businesses in the process of analyzing customer behavior towards the product, judge based on their background.
And knowledge of the product without using the opinion of real users.
While this leads the team astray.
In contrast, empathy tries to make the designs and ideas of the design thinking team come true by using potential customer awareness.
Empathy process in startups and companies:
In the meantime, the empathy process for products on the market and startup companies that produced a product is somewhat different.
Examining the “customer experience path” helps both businesses (companies formed and startups) for analysis.
Usually, startups can advance the empathy process by examining the customer in similar products.
In addition, using the techniques of analyzing competitors and their users, thereby realizing the hidden and obvious demands of the user.
Discovering what the user wants and converting it into demand ensures the sustainability of the startup in the market.
The failure of startups that fail at the beginning of their business is usually rooted in the lack of proper understanding demands of the customer.
The quantity and quality of the data collected from the methods mentioned above leave the business research teams free to analyze.
And better combine the issue in the next stage of the design thinking process.
Ask the right question to achieve empathy with the user:
Designing the right question is crucial to discovering the audience’s desires, needs, aspirations, and pains.
If the questions we design are wrong, they will confuse us in the continuation of the path.
You must have heard that reaching the right answer based on the wrong hypothesis will ultimately lead us to the wrong conclusion.
So, at this point, too, the wrong question sometimes leads to a seemingly correct answer, and this conclusion distorts the course of the business.
This can be the biggest weakness of the business in the empathy phase.
Characteristics of the right questions to get the right result:
In the empathy stage, it is very important to observe two conditions:
First, receiving information from the audience’s point of view without designing directional questions to try to give them direction.
Second, receiving information from the audience without inadvertently forcing them to give our preferred response.
Questions should be purposefully designed for better analysis and composition in the next stage of design thinking.
Direct questions usually do not work well to get a clear answer.
Hearing what the user has not said, seeing what the user has not done.
Furthermore, sensing unrevealed user feelings is the important and golden point of this section.
We should be aware that our questions cover all aspects of the user while using the product or service.
Such as space, activities performed, language, emotions, the purpose of use, other dependent and engaged objects, and events while doing work.
Assessing the user’s awareness and knowledge of the issue:
The audience’s understanding of the problem can be seen based on two themes: “awareness of the problem” and “knowledge of the problem”.
For example, in the box on the top right, the user is aware and also has sufficient knowledge of the problem.
In the second house at the top left, the audience is sufficiently aware of the presence of the problem.
But has not had enough knowledge of the current problem.
In this diagram, we examine the problems, pains, and aspirations of the audience.
About the subject and then divide them based on the level of awareness and knowledge about them.
Where the audience has neither knowledge nor awareness about pain and problems, it is a suitable space for discovering the design thinking team.
That’s where design thinking begins.
Remember that empathy is an analytical and divergent process.
At the end of this step, we are faced with a plethora of writing and audio.
Besides visual data, all of which are raw data and must be addressed in the next step, which is defining the problem.
Written By: Majid Ahmadi Khoshbakht, Founder of MAKH