Lesson Empathy-DT-LRP

Lesson 3-DT
3.1: The Power of Empathy

checar video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw
References & Where to Learn More

RSA Shorts: The Power of Empathy by Brené
Brown: https://www.thersa.org/discover/videos/rsa-shorts/2013/12/Brene-Brown-on-
Empathy
Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy
Empathy is an important element in Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design. What is

empathy exactly? Why is empathy so important to designing solutions that actually work for
people? Here, we’ll not only look at what empathy means, but will also look at how it helps
design thinkers create solutions that work and, conversely, how a lack of empathy can result in
product failure. We’ll also come to understand the empowering notion that everyone can
master empathy and design truly human-centred solutions.
What Is Empathy Exactly?

In a general sense, empathy is our ability to see the world through other people's eyes, to see
what they see, feel what they feel, and experience things as they do. Of course, none of us
can fullyexperience things the way someone else does, but we can attempt to get as close as
possible, and we do this by putting aside our own preconceived ideas and choosing to
understand the ideas, thoughts, and needs of others instead.
In Design Thinking, empathy is, as explained in IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, a

“deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for”. It
involves learning about the difficulties people face, as well as uncovering their latent needs
and desires in order to explain their behaviours. To do so, we need to have an understanding
of the people’s environment, as well as their roles in and interactions with their environment.
Empathy helps us gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of people's emotional and
physical needs, and the way they see, understand, and interact with the world around them.
It will also help us to understand how all of this has an impact on their lives generally,
specifically within the contexts being investigated. Unlike traditional marketing research,
empathic research is not concerned with facts about people (such as their weight or the
amount of food they eat), but more about their motivations and thoughts (for instance, why
they prefer to sit at home watching TV as opposed to going out for a jog). It’s inherently
subjective, since there is a fair amount of interpretation involved in finding out what people
mean rather than what they say.
Empathise
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
“Empathise” is the first stage of the Design Thinking process. The following stages can be
summarised as: Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. In the empathise stage, your goal, as a
designer, is to gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the
problem you are trying to solve. This process involves observing, engaging, and empathising
with the people you are designing for in order to understand their experiences and
motivations, as well as immersing yourself in their physical environment in order to have a
deeper personal understanding of the issues, needs and challenges involved.
Empathy is crucial to a human-centred design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy
helps design thinkers to set aside his or her own assumptions about the world in order to
gain insight into their users and their needs. Depending on your time constraints, you will
want to gather a substantial amount of information at this stage of the Design Thinking
process. In the Empathise stage of a Design Thinking process, you will develop the empathy,
understandings, experiences, insights and observations on which you will use to build the
rest of your design project. We cannot stress enough how important it is for designers such
as us to develop the best possible understanding of our users, their needs, and the problems
that underlie the development of the particular product or service we’re aiming to design. If
you have time and money, you should also consider consulting experts in order to find out
more about the people you design for, but you’ll be surprised at how much insight you and
your team can easily gain via practical Empathise methods.
Empathise methods
The following are our favourite Empathise methods:
• Assume a beginner’s mindset

• Ask What-How-Why
• Ask the 5 whys
• Conduct interviews with empathy
• Build empathy with analogies
• Use photo and video user-based studies
• Use personal photo and video journals
• Engage with extreme users
• Story share-and-capture
• Bodystorm
• Create journey maps
However, you will need to understand the following nuances and potentials of empathy
before you start using the above (amazing) methods.
Empathy vs. Sympathy

Sympathy, a word often confused with empathy, is more about one's ability to have or show
concern for the wellbeing of another, whereas to sympathize does not necessarily require
one to experience in a deep way what others experience. Additionally, sympathy often
involves a sense of detachment and superiority; when we sympathise, we tend to project
feelings of pity and sorrow for another person.
This feeling of pity and sorrow may not only rub people up the wrong way, but it is also
useless in a Design Thinking process. In Design Thinking, we are concerned
with understanding the people for whom we are designing solutions—for doing something
that can help them. When we visit our users in their natural environments in order to learn
about how they behave, or when we conduct interviews with them, we are not seeking for
opportunities to react to the people; rather, we want to absorb what they are going through,
and feel what they are feeling.
Why Empathy?
Moving Away from the Industrial Revolution
Since the invention of factories in the industrial revolution opened the gates to mass-
produced goods, mass consumerism has been an ever-growing part of how the world
operates. However, the one-size-fits-all approach to consumption and solving problems has
begun to show signs of inadequacy.
The truth is, using the power of “averages” is a terrible way to design solutions for people. In
the 1940s, the US Air Force learnt this the hard way. During this era, aviation accidents
happened very frequently (as many as 17 crashes a day). Initially, the air force presumed
that the reason for so many accidents was the air force’s switch to using more complicated
and faster planes. After some research, however, the air force discovered the real reason
behind the accidents; they had designed the planes’ cockpits and helmets to conform to the
dimensions of the “average” soldier’s body. In a study of over 4,000 air force pilots, it was
found that none of the air force pilots fell within the dimensions of the supposed “average”
man. It was no wonder pilots had problems with using the planes! In the end, the air force
created adjustable equipment to fit most soldiers’ bodies, thereby solving the problem.
Besides the problems with designing solutions based on averages, our mass consumerism
has a further issue: the high rate at which we are generating waste. In the past decade, our
consumption has turned global warming from a growing issue to an imminent crisis that
threatens to change the way we live (and even survive). Design Thinking, and in particular
empathy, is about creating solutions that are sustainable and focussed on all pertinent areas
that can affect us in the long term.
Author/Copyright holder: Petter Rudwall. Copyright terms and licence: CC0
Mass consumption, driven by the industrial revolution and the invention of factories, is putting
a huge environmental cost on our planet.
What They Say and What They Don't Say
People do not always convey all the details. They may withhold information out of fear,
distrust or some other inhibiting factor, be it internal or based on those with whom they are
engaging. Additionally, they may express themselves in ways not extremely articulate, thus
requiring the listener to make sense of what is not being said or what is being hinted at,
beneath the external expressions and words. As designers, we need to develop intuition,
imagination, emotional sensitivity, and creativity in or to dig deeper without prying too
personally, in order to extract the right kinds of insight so as to make a more meaningful
difference.
In other words, we need empathy so as to understand people thoroughly. Empathy is the

difference between taking what your users say at face value and observing what IDEO
Executive Design Director Jane Fulton Suri describes as “thoughtless acts” — small acts
people exhibit that reveal how their behaviours are shaped by their environments. When
people perform thoughtless acts such as hanging their sunglasses on their shirts, or
wrapping coloured stickers around their keys to differentiate them, it’s a sign of how an
imperfectly tailored environment forces an almost unconscious reaction on their part.
However, we can find opportunities for new insights and new solutions to help people within
unconscious acts.
Empathy is Crucial to Business Success
Many leaders within the innovation, learn, and entrepreneurship spaces in which Design
Thinking is prevalent have repeatedly pointed to three key parameters that define a
successful product or service. They are: desirability, feasibility, and viability.
It is not enough that the technology or means exist (i.e., feasibility is present) and that profits
or business benefits may be derived (i.e., it is viable). It is essential for users to actually have
a sense of desirability towards a solution. We can only fully understand and design a
desirable product or service when people's needs, experiences, wants, and preferences are
properly understood.
From a purely business profit-driven perspective, empathy is an essential component of any

sound business solution. If we develop solutions in isolation, without essential insights about
our users, we may create solutions that completely miss the mark and thus be ignored by the
market. For example, many MP3 players have come and gone without much creating much
of an impact, whereas the iPod was very successful at not only providing a technological
solution but also providing a completely desirable and profitable experience, which resulted
in Apple’s taking a market lead.
As Frank Chimero, illustrator and author of The Shape of Design, says:
“People ignore design that ignores people”.

– Frank Chimero
Designing Without Empathy: Google Glass

Google launched its first wearable product, the Google Glass, with much fanfare in 2013. The
head-mounted wearable computer, while being technologically impressive, failed to perform
well, and a lot of that comes down to a lack of empathy towards the users.
Although the Glass allows users to take photos, send messages and view other information
such as weather and transport directions, it does not actually fulfil the real needs of users. In
other words, although the Glass performs many things, these are not things you need or want
to get done.
Also, the Glass is generally a voice-activated device, and in our current social environment,
saying commands out loud in the streets such as, “Okay Glass, send a message,” just isn’t a
socially acceptable thing to do. Google’s lack of empathic understanding in the
user’s social environment is evident here; if the user has to perform socially awkward or
unacceptable acts to be able to use your product, you can be sure that few people would be
willing to use your product.
Lastly, the Glass featured a nondescript camera which resulted in privacy concerns for those
people around the Glass user, since there was no way of knowing whether or not they were
being filmed. All of these problems can be traced back to Google’s lack of empathy when they
designed the Glass, and this point is summed up nicely by the MIT Technology Review in one
sentence:
“No one could understand why you’d want to have that thing on your face, in the way of
normal social interaction.”
– MIT Technology Review
Author/Copyright holder: Antonio Zugaldia. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

The commercial failure of Google Glass can be traced to Google’s lack of empathy towards users:
voice-activated actions are socially awkward, the camera creates a privacy concern for people
around the Glass user, and the device doesn’t seem to solve any specific user needs.
Success with Empathy: The Embrace Warmer

With empathy, we can gain insights that could not be gathered by any other methods short
of highly accurate calculated guesses. A team of postgraduate students at Stanford were
tasked with developing a new type of incubator for developing countries. Their direct contact
with mothers in remote village settings who were unable to reach hospitals, helped them to
reframe their challenge to a warming device rather than a new kind of incubator.
Author/Copyright holder: Embrace Innovations. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.
The end result was The Embrace Warmer, which has the potential to save thousands of lives.
The Embrace Warmer is capable of going where no incubator could go before, due to its
portability and dramatically reduced production costs. The Embrace Warmer is an ultra-
portable incubator which can be wrapped around an infant and be used while the infant is
held in the mother’s arm. Instead of needing to deposit their babies into far-flung hospitals,
mothers in remote villages can use a portable warmer that serves the same need instead.
Had the team only thought of designing incubators, they may have developed a semi-
portable lower cost incubator, which would still not have made it into remote villages.
However, with the help of empathy—i.e., understanding the problems mothers in remote
villages face—the design team designed a human-centred solution that proved to be optimal
for mothers in developing countries. The objective of empathic research is uncovering, at
times, intangible needs and feelings, that indicate what should ideally change in the product,
system, or environment we're focusing on. Empathic research reveals the deeper needs and
root causes, which, if addressed correctly, may profoundly change the project we're
investigating. Instead of constantly designing new patches to cover or ease the
symptoms only momentarily, we have the power to create a paradigm shift and
provide a wide range of benefits packaged into a single solution. We can create new
markets and move whole communities closer to higher order needs and goals. We can
change the world when we operate at the appropriate levels.
Anyone Can Master Empathy

The empathy aspects of Design Thinking are named differently depending on whose version
you might be following, but the core is essentially the same—i.e., being deeply human-
centred. Different schools and Design Thinking companies have called empathic research
"the Empathise stage" (which is the term we use), "the understand phase", and "the hear
phase", and "looking", as well as a number of other terms.
If you are worried that you are unable to master the ability to be empathetic towards the
people you are designing for fully, there is good news. Neuroscientists have recently
discovered that empathy is hard-wired into the way humans are made and is an integral part
of our physiology. They discovered that while humans observe others performing certain
actions, or experience certain states, the observer's brain activity resembles someone
actually engaged in the activity being observed. In other words, empathy is an innate quality
that we can all make use of in order to design for the people around us.
We have all experienced the flurry of emotions or the rush of adrenalin experienced though
merely observing someone else engaged in certain activities. We are empathetic beings by
our very nature, though, to a large extent, our social contexts and learning may work to
remove this built-in empathy, or, at the very least, tame it. When you engage with the people
you design for, keeping an open mind and being conscientious about developing empathy is
key to a successful Design Thinking process and end product.
The Take Away

Empathy is important for us as designers and particularly for design thinkers because it
allows us to truly understand and uncover the latent needs and emotions of the people we
are designing for. As such, we can design solutions that meet the three parameters of a
successful product or service: desirability, feasibility and viability. In Design Thinking, we
call this "the Empathise stage". Designing with empathy is what separates a human-centred
product like The Embrace Warmer from another, such as Google’s Glass. The good news is
that everybody can master empathy and become a great design thinker: we are all innately
empathic.
The Star, When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages,
2016: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-
discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html
Jane Fulton Suri, Thoughtless Acts?, 2005: https://www.ideo.com/by-ideo/thoughtless-acts
The Embrace Warmer: http://embraceglobal.org/about-us/
MIT Technology Review, Google Glass Is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses,
2014: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/532691/google-glass-is-dead-long-live-
smart-glasses/
IDEO: Human-Centered Design Toolkit, 2009: https://www.ideo.com/work/human-

centered-design-toolkit/
Psychology Today, The Neuroscience of Empathy,

2013: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201310/the-
neuroscience-empathy
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Rémi Walle. Copyright terms and licence: CC0
How to Develop an Empathic Approach in Design

Thinking
Empathy requires us to put aside our learning, culture, knowledge, opinions, and worldview
purposefully in order to understand other peoples’ experiences of things deeply and
meaningfully. It requires a strong sense of imagination for us to be able to see through another
person’s eyes. It requires humility so we can seek to abandon our preconceived ideas and biases.
It requires that we have a heightened awareness of other peoples’ needs, wants, motivations
and goals. Let’s go through the traits an empathic observer should possess—and some methods
you can use to gain a deep understanding of the people for whom you are designing.
Empathy is an innate quality in all people. Still, sometimes, being an empathic listener in a
Design Thinking project is not as simple as it seems, because we are trained — whether
consciously in our schools or workplaces, or subconsciously from our prior experiences —
to form judgements and opinions about others rather than absorbing and understanding the
raw data.
There are many interrelated qualities and characteristics that combine to develop a more
empathic approach to engaging with others. Keeping these qualities and traits in mind, and
learning to develop them, are key to forming a deep and genuine understanding of your
users.
Empathy is especially important in the first stage of any Design Thinking process. The first
stage in Design Thinking is often named the “empathise” stage – the following four stages
are: Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. In the Empathise stage, it’s your goal as a designer to
gain an empathic understanding of the people you’re designing for and the problem you are
trying to solve. This involves empathising with, engaging and observing the people—your
target audience—you intend to help.
How to be an Empathic Observer

1. Abandon Your Ego
Most of us have a tendency to assert ourselves, which results in an imposition upon others,
as well as having more concern about our own situation rather than the needs and concerns
of others. Often in our education or workplace, we are taught to adopt an egocentric view of
things and be firm in our opinions and thoughts. However, in order to empathise deeply, we
need to tame and put aside our egos. We need to become aware of the primary goal of
empathy in Design Thinking, which is to understand and experience the feelings of others.
2. Adopt Humility
When we adopt humility, we naturally improve our ability to empathise, because through
humility we elevate the value of others above ourselves. This is underscored in Rise of the
DEO, a book by Maria Guidice, innovator and VP of Experience Design in Autodesk, and
Christopher Ireland, ethnographer and CEO of design research firm Cheskin. In Rise of the
DEO, Guidice and Ireland discuss the emerging role of design leadership and point out that
humility is a characteristic of design-focused leaders who are willing to admit their own
shortcomings as well as to abandon preconceived ideas for the good of the overall vision and
goals.
3. Be a Good Listener
So as to empathise, we need to listen and listen attentively. We need to choose actively to

block out our inner conflicting voices, and allow the other's voice to resonate. We need to
train ourselves to control our natural tendency to formulate our own opinions and voice
them before the other person has finished talking. Doing so would enable us to have a deeper
kind of listening, which uncovers deeper meaning and experience.
4. Hone Your Observation skills
In order to develop empathy towards our users, we need to do more than listen. We need to
observe others, and have a close reading of their behaviours, subtle indications, their non-
verbal expressions, body language, and environments. Only once we are able to experience
the full range of sensations of others within context can we have a deeper and more
meaningful empathic experience. Many times, what our users articulate is only be a fraction
of the full story. By honing our observation skills, we can fill many of the gaps, leading to a
deeper understanding of someone else's experience.
5. Care
A genuine concern about the state of others, leading to the desire to act and assist, is required.
This is one of the important drivers that allow us to overcome our own needs and wants and
seek to understand others. We must build a sense of care, a deep concern and desire to want
to help, nurture, and provide assistance. This requires a level of emotional insight.
"No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care."
– Theodore Roosevelt
6. Be Curious
Being genuinely curious makes engaging in empathy research not only easier but also
extremely rewarding as we learn to understand what motivates people. By being curious, we
are naturally inclined to dig into unexpected areas, uncover new insights, and explore all
aspects of people's lives. At a glance, these details might seem unimportant, but they will
expose the most important information we need for problem solving.
7. Be Sincere
Nothing kills empathy more than a lack of sincerity. When we approach people with a
superficial agenda, superiority complex, or any mindset that may undermine our sincere
intention to understand their experience deeply, we are placing a barrier between us and
those we seek to understand. Rather than approaching people with the mindset that they are
in need of our help, we should realise that we stand to benefit more out of deeply
understanding them. After all, the solution exists to serve their needs, and your work will not
be complete unless you properly understand their needs.
Learn to Understand Body Language
We should have a keen awareness of how our body language sets the scene for trust and
engagement between ourselves and the people we are observing or interviewing. On top of
that, we need to read and interpret the signals that our users give off via their body language.
This is a skill that comes with practice, and thus practice we must. At times, body language
might be so subtle that the messages made by our very forms (eyebrows, shoulders, hands,
and virtually any other part) as well as how we sound and behave are visible only to
practiced readers of body language. If we want to connect with and engage our users on a
deeper level, we need to study their body language, body signals, facial expressions, voice
intonations, and the positive and negative signs that come from these. Here are some of the
little things that you should pay attention to:
• Learn to read the subtle nuances in communication, change of tone, pauses and
skipping back over points.
• Listen to what is not being said, to what's being avoided or covered up.
• Subtly know when to encourage more expression or to lead the conversation or story
in a beneficial direction.
• Know what to ask and how to ask it—and when the person might be ready to be
asked.
Author/Copyright holder: crew.co. Copyright terms and licence: Free to use.
Our body language often says much more about ourselves than what we say verbally. It’s a great
‘lie detector’ in many respects.
How to Gain an Empathic Understanding of People

The most effective way you can gain empathy comes in the form of immersion: direct
experience of the lives, contexts, environments, and activities of the people you would like
to understand better. On top of immersing yourself in the environment to experience first-
hand what it feels like to be your user, there are also a couple of methods you can engage in
so as to gain a deeper understanding of people’s needs and emotions. Here, we will highlight
three methods, and provide a template for each that you can download and use. Remember:
the key to developing empathy is to go out there and practice with real people.
What-How-Why Method
The What-How-Why method is a tool that you can use while observing people to help you
dive into your observations and derive deeper levels of understanding. With the What-How-
Why method, you start with concrete observations — the What — and from there move to
higher levels of abstraction — asking How — and then finally you arrive at the Why—i.e., the
emotional drivers behind people’s behaviours. This method is extremely useful for you to
analyse images that you might have taken while observing your users.
You should divide your observations into three sections: What, How and Why.
• In What, note down the details of what is happening. What is the person doing? What
is happening in the background? What is the person holding? Describe
using adjectives and try to be as concrete as possible.
• In How, describe how the person is doing what he or she is doing. For instance, is the
person putting in a great deal of effort? Is the person frowning or smiling while doing
the task? Does the person use many ad-hoc tools to make the task easier? Try to
describe the emotional impact of performing the task.
• Finally, in Why, try to interpret the scene. Based on the What and How observations,
guess the emotional drivers behind the person you are observing. The person might
be frowning while doing a task because she is concerned about hurting herself in the
process — which means safety is a driver of her behaviours.
You can download the What-How-Why method template here.
Conducting an Interview with Empathy
At many points in your Design Thinking project, you will be interviewing your users. During
the initial stages as you build your understanding of users, and after testing prototypes with
them, you are likely to ask them questions so as to probe deeper into their emotions and
behaviours. To make the most out of your interviews, you should sufficiently prepare your
team before each one. Make a list of questions you want to ask your users. Then, group the
questions into themes or topics, and try to create a smooth flow between the topics so that
your interview would flow naturally.
During the interview, you’ll need to ask the question “Why?” on a constant basis — even
though you might think you already know the answer. Chances are, your users are going to
have their own answers that challenge your assumptions about them. Keep in mind that
people tend to have gaps in what they say they do and what they actually do; it happens to
all of us, and observing where these gaps form can help you gain insights about users.
You can download the template for conducting interviews with empathy here.
Building Empathy with Analogies
An analogy is a comparison between two things—for example, a comparison of a heart to a

pump. We communicate in analogies as they allow us to express our ideas or to explain
complex matters in an understandable and motivating way. Analogies are a great way for us
to build empathy towards users and for generating new ideas around a problem. Use
analogies to gain a fresh way of looking at an environment, and in instances where direct
observation is hard to achieve.
When using analogies, you should start by identifying the aspects of a situation that are most
important, interesting, or problematic. For instance, if you are working on improving a
supermarket experience, some of the key aspects might be containing and separating
different goods in the shopping cart, making a decision when presented with many options,
and handling long waiting lines. Then, find other experiences that contain some of these
aspects — it will help you gain a better understanding of your users’ problems, and it will
also spark new ideas to improve their experiences.
You can download the template for building empathy with analogies here.
The Take Away

Empathy is innate in everyone, and focusing on some key traits of an empathic observer can
help you unlock and augment your empathic skills so you can gain a greater understanding
of the latent needs of users. At the same time, learning about what people’s body language
tells us (above and beyond what they say verbally) is a skill that we can hone with practice.
Immersing yourself in your users’ shoes is the best way to learn about them, and, on top of
that, there are a couple of useful methods you can employ — the What-How-Why method,
interviewing, and using analogies to build empathy — so as to gain a deep and holistic
understanding of your users.

Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland, Rise of the DEO - Leadership by Design,
2013: http://riseofthedeo.com/
James Borg, Body Language: 7 Easy Lessons to Master the Silent Language, 2009.
d.school Bootcamp Bootleg, 2013: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-

content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: : Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation.
Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Empathy – How to Improve Your Designs by

Developing Empathy for Your Target Group
Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with another person’s context, emotions, goals
and motivations. In order to design great experiences, successful design firms actively search
for empathic insights into their target group. In a design context, empathy serves a distinct
purpose: to inspire design decisions in the early stages of the process. At IDEO, for example, the
design team is so convinced about the positive effect it has on their projects that they actively
advocate it to inspire other designers and innovators. Here, you’ll learn how you can develop
empathy for your target group.
Using empathy in the design process is on the one hand about collecting subjective
information and on the other hand about objectively analysing it. The best way to collect the
subjective information is to embed yourself in the context of your target group and gain
personal insights into the experiences they have. There are three different approaches for
you to use:
• Looking at what people do
• Asking people to participate
• Trying things yourself
You should use them together to get empathic on an affective and a cognitive level. We will
explain these approaches and how to use them. But first, we’ll take a closer look at the role
of empathy in the design process and the four general steps you need to take in developing
empathy for your target group.
“Design empathy is an approach that draws upon people’s real-world experiences to address
modern challenges. When companies allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs
to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams, and even their organization at large—
they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”
— Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard from IDEO, 2014
Why is Empathy Important in a Design Process?

By the mid-2010s, the design profession had experienced another major shift. Once, the
move had taken it from designing products to services; by this point, however,
designing experiences was the name of the game. Each shift means that you design for a
broader perspective, and each shift builds upon the existing knowledge of the previous
perspective. Take biking, for example. In the past, when you wanted to make a biking trip,
you had to get a map of the area: the simple product which you could use to plan your own
route. Later, services started to appear that would take this planning work out of your hands.
You could go to a place (online or in the real world) to have a route planned based on your
preferences. Now, when planning a biking trip, you can join an online bike community. You
can get inspired by other peoples’ experiences and share routes.
Author/Copyright holder: Bureau of Land Management. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Biking is an example of how the design profession has shifted from designing products, to
services and now, experiences. Now, when planning a biking trip, you can join an online bike
community and get inspired by other peoples’ experiences. This shift results in a bigger
importance for developing empathy for your target group.
In order to design not only products and services but also experiences, you need to know
different things about your users than you would if you were merely designing products.
When you learn about people on an objective level, you can understand what
they need for performing their tasks. When you learn about your target group on
a subjective level, you can understand what they are aiming for and what they
are feeling when they are trying to accomplish it. You need the latter for designing
experiences. In the bike example, it is—therefore—less important to understand what steps
people take to plan a biking trip than it is to know what emotions they would like
to associate with it. Getting empathic insights is key in this process.
“The aim of empathic design studies is not to seek solutions for recognized problems, but rather
to look for design opportunities as well as develop a holistic understanding of the users. Design
empathy is not only information and facts but also inspiration and food for ideas.”
— Tuuli Mattelmäki, Finnish industrial designer, researcher & lecturer, 2003
The Four Steps in Developing Empathy for your Target Group

As we mentioned before, there are three approaches to collecting the subjective information
that you need so as to gain empathy for your target group. Each approach involves four
general steps. According to Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, design researcher and co-creator of the
context mapping method (a method that allows you to gather deep insights into what people
feel and dream), these steps are:
• Discovery: enter the user’s world and make contact with the user. This will help you
get into the right mind-set to understand the user. Let’s say you’re designing a new
workflow for employees working at a self-service food court to improve their
efficiency. Maybe you have never exchanged more than a few words with the people
behind the counters of a self-service food court. You don’t know them. Walking
around behind the scenes and getting a glimpse of the hours they put in and the
limited space they have to move around in helps you get into the right mind-set. It
triggers your designer’s curiosity.
• Immersion: wander around in the user’s world to collect qualitative data. This helps
you take the user’s point of reference. When you start to collect data actively by
participating as a member of the food court team, talking to them during coffee breaks
and taking pictures of things that stand out to you, you start to experience the context
from your users’ point of view.
• Connection: resonate with the user, and recall your own experiences to connect and
create meaning. This step may occur naturally while collecting the data. For example,
when you find out how irritated the employees are by the lack of communication
about changing menus and special offers, you might recall how it felt when you were
in design school and teachers forgot to communicate clearly about changing
mandatory literature for the next exam! Not having the right information to do your
job properly may lead to a feeling of helplessness. You remember how it feels. You
understand and identify with their context and feelings. You have empathic insights.
• Detachment: step back into the role of designer, reflect and create ideas. While it may
seem sufficient to get the empathic insights by following the previous steps, you need
to look at your subjective data with a designer’s mind so as to translate the empathic
insights into ideas. A feeling of frustration about the lack of communication may seem
solvable by actions directed at the team manager at first. Even so, after creating an
overview of the insights and reflecting on it more objectively, you can use the informal
communication that is already used between team members to create solutions that
will give them a stronger feeling of control.
Author/Copyright holder: Ryan Lackey. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
When you’re designing a new workflow, for example for employees working at a self-service
food court to improve their efficiency, you need to get empathic insights so as to understand
who you’re designing for. In the discovery step, you just wander around to trigger your curiosity.
In the immersion step, you start to collect qualitative data in the user’s context. In the
connection step, you start to create meaning from the data you gather, by connecting them to
your own experiences. You finally step back into the role of the designer to reflect and create
ideas in the detachment step.
These steps reflect the balance you need between collecting subjective information on the
one hand and objectively analysing it on the other. However, these steps are not terms that
you are likely to use when you are trying to organise time and resources around the design
research phase of a project. Rather than talking about immersion and detachment, you will
be speaking in terms of collecting and analysing the qualitative data. Collecting information
from your target group is the overlap between the immersion and connection steps. Analysis
of the collected data is the detachment step. From here on, we will use these simpler terms
and explain how to perform these steps in more detail.
Author/Copyright holder: Priscilla Esser and Interaction Design Foundation.
The four steps in developing empathy for your target group are discovery, immersion,
connection and detachment. In your day-to-day design process, you’re more likely to refer to
these steps as collecting and analysing data. Adapted from Merlijn Kouprie and Froukje
Sleeswijk-Visser, “A Framework for Empathy in Design: Stepping in and out of the User’s
Life”. Journal of Engineering Design Vol. 20, No. 5, October 2009, 437–448
How to Collect the Data You Need to Develop Empathy

Jane Fulton Suri, partner emeritus and executive design director at IDEO, describes that
collecting information by embedding yourself in the user’s context (the 2 nd step, Immersion,
and the 3rd step, Connection) can happen in three ways:
• Looking at what people really do in their current natural context or with

prototypes you expose to them — This is a matter of observation of behaviours,
interactions and products. Depending on the design assignment, you can plan to focus
on certain aspects of the context. In any case, you will record your observations for
further analysis and communication. You can do this by using notes, sketches of
routes on maps, photographs, videos, etc. For example, mapping medical equipment
and nurses on a hospital ward can lead to insights into how to improve the efficiency
of workflows which your target audience will experience. And recording a video of
walking a route through a government building at the eye-level height of a wheelchair
user can lead to insights into how to improve the experience of accessibility.
• Asking people to participate by recording their behaviour and context or by
expressing their thoughts and feelings — You can do this without embedding yourself
in the user’s context by using a probes kit for context mapping (a collection of
exercises designers give to a target group in a design project so as to obtain an
understanding of their lives). However, embedding yourself in a context when asking
people to participate may give deeper insights. For example, you might have seniors
in a nursing home hand out cards with a pre-printed message which thanks the
recipient, typically—in this case—a caregiver, an administration person or a member
of the ancillary services (e.g., a janitor or cook). You could walk around with them
when they give each one to a person they choose, thereby giving you enormous
insights into the reasons behind their choices and the interactions these generate.
Also here, you should use recording methods, such as filming or photographing, to
preserve the data for later use.
• Trying things yourself: to gain personal insights into the kinds of experiences others
may have — This method is most time-consuming, but it may lead to different and
more emotional insights. Resonating with the user on an emotional level may be
easiest when you, for example, clean toilets in an office building for a few days and
experience the mess people leave behind and the times people don’t greet you like
they do their colleagues. It is possibly the most difficult data to capture, but diary-
style notes can be a good basis.
While all three approaches focus on gaining empathy, the first is more objective (more
focused on cognitive aspects) and the last more subjective (more focused on affective
aspects). Both are relevant in connecting with your users, so a mix of approaches will be most
useful.
Author/Copyright holder: Nate Grigg. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
Trying things yourself is a very powerful way to develop empathy. It lets you focus on how it
feels to be the user. Sometimes, when the target group has specific physical characteristics,
we—as the designers involved—might even need special suits so as to step into the user’s shoes
more profoundly. Such suits exist for pregnant women or elderly people.
Regardless of which mix of approaches you choose, selecting the right people and contexts
to include in the data collection is important. All embedded approaches to collecting data for
empathy take a substantial amount of time. Therefore, it is always more useful to focus
on purpose than statistics when selecting the people and contexts to include in the data
collection. For example, if you had a design project to improve the integration of immigrant
children at school, you could embed yourself in a primary school class with two or three
immigrant children. Looking at what the children do as well as how they interact and asking
them to express their thoughts and feelings could give you valuable insights. You could even
participate by taking the role of the school teacher for a day. This embedded research will
easily take you a week of intensive data collection. Statistically, you would not be able to
come to solid conclusions. However, as you’re interested in the insights from a design
research perspective and need these to generate design ideas, the conclusions are very
valuable. Having a statistically sound sample of more than one class or three immigrant
children would simply take too much time without adding to the value of insights. So that
they can still convince stakeholders of the relevance of findings, design teams at IDEO use
data from desk research to back up the insights.
How to Analyse the Data Needed so as to Develop Empathy

The data you collect is very diverse, from personal impressions to pictures, quotes, maps and
sketches. When analysing, your focus is on finding patterns or clusters that ‘stand out’ in
some way as being an opportunity for design. For these patterns or clusters to emerge, you
need to use your designer’s intuition, but you can help it along with techniques borrowed
from qualitative research methods.
Best practice for an analysis process:
• Gather all data into one room. Lay the materials out on tables and walls so you can
see everything. Get two or three members of your design team together for the
analysis.
• Look at the data and start to see if some have similar themes. You can base these
themes on underlying problems, recurrence of negative feelings, or anything else that
sticks out and seems relevant to your design problem. Don’t worry if you find it
difficult at first. This step in the analysis process will get better with experience. Stick
with it.
• Label or cluster your data into categories, based on the themes you find. Use
sticky notes and markers in different colours to indicate which pieces of data belong
together.
• Summarise the findings. At first, this could be an unorganised list of all conclusions.
Then, you may add a hierarchy or (again) categories. Finally, you can summarise the
findings in personas, requirements, mental models, scenarios, flowcharts or graphs.
This will allow you to use the insights in any step of the remaining process and
communicate them to stakeholders.
Author/Copyright holder: Luca Mascaro. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Analysing the qualitative data from embedded research is best done with a few designers, to
allow discussion. Using different colours of sticky notes and markers, you and your fellow
designers can indicate themes to create an overview.
The Take Away

In order to design great experiences, you need empathic insights. It is important to balance
the steps of collecting subjective insights with objective reasoning and analysis. The best way
to collect the subjective information is to embed yourself in the context of your target group
and gain personal insights into the experiences they have. Three different approaches are
available to you. Together, they enable you to get empathic on an affective and a cognitive
level: observing people, asking them to express themselves and experiencing things yourself.
You should take four steps in each approach: discovery, immersion, connection and
detachment. When analysing the collected data, you can borrow techniques from traditional
qualitative research and apply them so as to find opportunities for design. If you’re especially
attentive and careful throughout these processes, you may access powerful insights into your
target group’s way of seeing the world.
Jane Fulton Suri, Empathic Design: Informed and Inspired by Other People’s Experience. In: Ilpo
Koskinen, Katja Battarbee, and Tuuli Mattelmäki, eds. Empathic Design: User Experience in
Product Design, 2003
Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri and Suzanne Gibbs Howard, Empathy on the edge: Scaling
and Sustaining a Human-Centered Approach in the Evolving Practice of Design,
2014: https://www.ideo.com/images/uploads/news/pdfs/Empa...
Merlijn Kouprie and Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, “A Framework for Empathy in Design:

Stepping in and out of the User’s Life”. Journal of Engineering Design Vol. 20, No. 5, October
2009, 437–448
Probes for Context Mapping – how to Design and

Use them
Whether you are designing a mobile app, a professional online platform or an interactive
museum exhibition, it is essential to understand users and the context in which they will use
your design. Traditional methods such as interviews and observations will help you to touch the
surface of their lives. A deeper understanding of what your users feel and dream comes from
generative techniques such as context mapping. To use this technique effectively, you need to
design the probes kit with care. Learn about the three key points you should pay attention to
when preparing probes for context mapping so as to take your designs to the next level
“Human-centred design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing
for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. All you have to do is empathize, understand them,
and bring them along with you in the design process.”
– IDEO field guide to human-centred design, 2015
People are experts in and regarding their own lives and experiences. The understanding of
users in their context is essential for creating truly innovative products. In the early stages
of a project, we as designers can use the context mapping technique to inspire and to build
empathy. Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, who is a design researcher and one of the founders of the
context mapping technique, describes that this technique:
• Allows designers to get to the latent needs, dreams and aspirations of a target group.
• Includes probes that enable users to show you their world, their reflections on it and
their dreams about its future, all in an active way.
Probes for context mapping are exercises we give to a target group in a design project; from
these, we can get an understanding about their lives. The purpose of probes is to inspire us
as designers at the starting phases of a project and to sensitise users to their own context.
The way in which you set up the exercises is essential for eliciting the desired rich
information.
A typical probes kit includes materials for activities over a short period. They evoke personal
responses to a stimulus or a question. You need to design probes that playfully invite users
to share rich clues about their lives rather than gather factual information about them.
Copyright holder: Priscilla Esser and Interaction Design Foundation, Adapted from Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, Pieter Jan Stappers, Remko van der Lugt, and Elisabeth
B.-N. Sanders, Context Mapping: Experiences from Practice. CoDesign, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2005, 119–149. Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-ND
Types of user research in the early stages of design. Context mapping is a technique that falls in
the category of generative techniques, allowing us as designers to get to a deeper
understanding of what users know, feel and dream. In generative techniques, users actively
participate in generating ideas that can serve as a starting point for the design process.
Adapted from Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, Pieter Jan Stappers, Remko van der Lugt, and Elisabeth
B.-N. Sanders, Context Mapping: Experiences from Practice. CoDesign, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2005,
119 – 149.
The Three Stages in the Context Mapping Process and how to

develop the Best Probes to Fit into it
The context mapping procedure involves three stages:
• Preparing and developing the probes: We will share the essential three steps,
which will help you get started in the best possible way, and you will learn which
three types of probes usually work well.
• Collecting: The main stage is where you collect the insights from your users, who will
have your probes kit with small exercises and live with it for a few days. You will then
use the results as input for the generative session where your goal is to get to a deeper
understanding of what your users know, feel and dream through the ideas they
generate.
• Communicating: Analysing and sharing the insights with the design team or other
stakeholders in the project concludes the context mapping process and ensures the
design process to continue in the right direction.
To collect the best insights from users and get them in the right mind-set, you must have
proper preparation. You need to collect feelings rather than facts, ambitions rather
than tasks. For you to get rich details, the preparation phase should pay attention to three
key steps.
Copyright holder: Priscilla Esser and Interaction Design Foundation, Adapted from ID Studiolab, Context Mapping & Experience Design, 2008. Copyright licence:
CC-BY-NC-ND
The process of the context mapping technique involves three stages: Preparing, collecting and
communicating. The preparation stage is essential to the two following stages. We will now see
how to prepare probes for context mapping in more detail. Adapted from ID Studiolab, Context
Mapping & Experience Design, 2008.
Stage 1. Preparing – How to Prepare Probes for Context

Mapping
Preparing – Step A
Start by clearly stating the goal of the cultural probe and selecting probe types that match
your users. As with any design research method, determining what you need to know is
the most important step. For example, when designing an interactive experience to get
asthma patients out to exercise, you may need insights into their social lives besides their
walking habits. And when you design an online library platform that seduces students to
read more relevant literature, you may need insights into their internet activities throughout
the day along with their study behaviours.
The trick is to remain broad enough to inspire design, while remaining focused on the design
problem at hand. Depending on the goal and your target group, some probes and exercises
will be more successful than others. If probing commuters is your goal, you should design a
probes kit they can easily take with them. If you want to understand 2 nd-grade school
teachers, however, you should use a probes kit that focuses on exercises in the classroom.
Key questions to help you get started:
• What is the goal of the cultural probe? What do you need to know?
• Which probe types match your users?
Preparing – Step B
Create the kit in a way that you slowly sensitise your users and take them along in your line
of thinking. To get participants in the right mind-set and have them reflect on their
lives, you need to ease them into it.
The best ways to approach your participants:
• Help them go from descriptive to imaginative. By starting with gathering some

factual information about their habits and contexts, you prep their minds by having
them think about it in a way they normally don’t. They will start being more
perceptive of their environment—and they will start paying attention to the things
you need them to. For example, by starting them with exercises such as mapping out
their workflow on a particular day or taking pictures of their meals, you can later ask
them what eating goals they would like to achieve, or what support they would need
to get a healthier lifestyle.
• Help them go from the present to the future. By starting with recollecting concrete
events and activities (for example, the last time someone has made a large
purchase) and then describing and visualising current behaviours (such as mapping
all the incidences of cash payments), the participant is more likely to think about what
he would like to see differently in the future. As a designer, you should probably take
these steps automatically in your head when someone asks you what a future
payment service for people on a tight budget would be. Your users have the ability to
give you those insights, as long as you take them with you in the proper steps.
Preparing – Step C
Design for the ending of the probes: decide how to follow up after collecting the probes
kit. Your users have put a lot of effort into fulfilling the exercises. Rather than having
them send their completed pieces to you in the mail, you should consider ways to make it
more personal. If possible, collect the probes kits in person, to show your commitment to
them. This will keep them engaged, and it provides you with the opportunity to get them
enthusiastic about the generative session you may be hosting afterwards.
“Even with a one-day study enough time needs to be made for the sensitizing process for users,
researchers, designers and other members of the team.”
– Sleeswijk-Visser et al., design researcher at Delft University of Technology, 2005
Key questions to help you end the probes:
• How will you collect the probes kit?

• How will you follow up after collecting the probes kit?
Example of a bad Probes Kit

Imagine having a design project aimed at improving the experience of hospitalised children
suffering from cancer. The context of a child oncology ward is hopefully unfamiliar terrain
for you, so you need to do research. The aim of this research is to get insights into how the
children experience the environment, whom they like to share the experience with and what
would trigger them to be happier, more active and positive.
You know from a short interview with the head nurse that they spend days on end in bed,
bored and lonely. Building upon your experience with children, you decide to design some
probes that would fit their age group. It starts with a drawing exercise, where they’re asked
to draw their daily routine on a timeline, including the people they meet. Then, a photo
assignment asks them to take pictures of their favourite parts of the ward. A writing task
allows them to write what they would like a day in hospital to be like. Finally, they can draw
their perfect hospital room on a pre-printed map—sounds like something a child might
enjoy, right?
However, when you retrieve the probes kits from the children, they are sleeping. And their
mums and dads explain to you that they have been too sick to do all the tasks. In the end,
they have tried to write down the daily routines for you themselves. What went wrong?
You had a clear goal and created the kit to take the children gradually from descriptive to
imaginative and from present to future. You explained everything in person and were always
available to answer any questions. They knew you would be coming around today.
Nevertheless, you didn’t grasp the impact of the disease on each child. It’s time for an
iteration.
Copyright holder: Priscilla Esser and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-ND
Example of a timeline that could result when parents help their children do the probe exercises
while staying in hospital. If this is the only result you get from your probes kit, it is not giving
you more inspiring information than an interview could have done. If this turns out to be the
case, it is essential that you redesign your probes kit.
Example of a good Probes Kit

The main things you realised from the failed attempt were the constant presence of the
parents and the role they play. For the next version of your probes kit, you include them in
the exercises. Also, all tasks are fit for lying in bed, and you take more time to allow for bad
days where the child will do nothing but sleep. The redesigned kit starts with pictures the
child takes of anything he wants in his hospital room. When he can take at least seven
pictures, his parents will give him a prize: a cuddly toy that’s included in the kit. Then, the
child can draw a circle around his favourite places in the ward on a map. The parents then
have to visit that place and guess what the favourite item is. For every good guess, the
parents will receive a sticker from the child they can stick on their clothes. The child is also
asked to write a postcard to someone he would like to spend time with in hospital, describing
what he would like to do. Finally, the parents can read their child a story, written with the
patient as the hero. Parts of the story invite the child to engage and fantasise about how the
story would unfold. These clues give you all the insights you need into these youngsters’
dreams and wishes.
As you collect the probes kits this time, you encounter smiling mums and dads, explaining to
you how they enjoyed working on these assignments with their children. It has taken more
time than anticipated, but you finally have the rich insights you need to design something
that will truly make a difference in these troubled lives.
Copyright holder: Liz West. Copyright licence: CC BY
View from a hospital bed, as an example of the results that could come out of a good probes kit.
By taking pictures, users can give us insights into their lives and inspire the design process. This
picture, for example, shows a lack of personalisation in hospital rooms. This can open up a
whole new design direction for improving the hospital experience for children.
Best Practices: Three Types of Probes that usually Work well

As designers, we typically create probes to gather information over time. Best practice: many
of us choose a one-week time frame as participants often do not want to be engaged if the
process is too long, but you should adapt it to your target group’s needs. Each assignment
should take no more than five to ten minutes per day to complete (or less, as became obvious
in the child cancer example). You may find the following probes useful in numerous projects:
• Writing and drawing about events or objects in their context. Have participants
write a short story on a particular aspect of their day or a specific event in the past.
To provoke a certain type of text, you can provide specific formats for the texts, such
as postcards or small diaries. Provide paper and pencils for participants to draw
what’s in their heads rather than what’s objectively observable. Drawing is perfect for
gathering their subjective experiences. Make people feel comfortable by giving
examples of non-intimidating drawing styles.
• Taking a photograph of their situation on set times in a day. Give a focused
assignment with subject, type and number of photos. Possibly give them a trigger via
text message when the timing of the picture is essential. If your target group has smart
phones, you should, of course, take advantage of it.
• Mapping their daily routines and the feelings they generate. Provide maps of indoor
or outdoor areas relevant for the subject. Also, provide pens or pencils to write and
draw on the maps. If you want to know about their feelings and experiences, have
some spaces around the maps to make notes. The mapping exercise can be part of a
photograph assignment. For example, you can ask them to take pictures along their
route to work and indicate on a map where they took the pictures.
Stage 2. Collecting – The Main Stage

Now you’re ready to go to the next stage in the context mapping process where you can start
collecting the insights from your users.
Collecting – Step A
First, you will give your users your probes kit with small exercises, and they will live with it
for a few days. This step is called sensitising, as it helps users get sensitive to their own
context and viewing it in a more conscious way. They will fill the kit with all the rich goodness
you need as input for your design process. When you get the kits back, you will have a field
day going through them all. You should lay the kits out in front of you and try to see patterns.
Pieter Jan Stappers and Elisabeth Sanders, experts on generative research methods, advise
you to label every piece of information for future reference every time. You can do this by
recording the who (including the participants’ names), where and when of the data.
Collecting – Step B
You will then use the data as input for the generative session. Although users are experts in
their own lives, they are not designers and thus not used to thinking about designs that do
not exist yet. The kits will have sensitised your users, so they are more prepared to think
about the future and create solutions themselves. In the generative session, you help users
create ideas.
Collecting – Step C
Lastly, you need to start a discussion with the users. With the probes kits, they have given
inspiring insights and fragments of their lives. In the generative session, they have created
new ideas on what would work in their context. You should complete this information by
understanding the reasoning behind it. Having an open discussion will allow you to get this
understanding.
Stage 3. Communicating – the Final Stage

Finally, after collecting all the inspiring material from your users, you need to analyse it.
Sometimes, patterns or clusters will emerge. Other times, a single picture or quote will stand
out. Regardless of the types of insights you come up with, or how you found them in the rich
data, you need to communicate them. Fellow design team members will need the insights to
push the design process in the right direction. Other stakeholders may need the insights to
internalise the need to innovate.
According to Pieter Jan Stappers and Elisabeth Sanders, a challenge in this stage is to
communicate the insights in a way that reflects the dreams and aspirations of your target
group while respecting their privacy.
The Take Away

The context mapping procedure involves three stages: preparing, collecting and
communicating. Preparing the right kind of probes kit is essential for gathering rich insights
into your target group that will inspire the early stages of design. Three key steps you should
consider when preparing and designing a probes kit are:
• Always start by clearly stating the goal of the cultural probe and selecting probe
types that match your users.
• Create the kit in a way that slowly sensitises your users and takes them
along in your line ofthinking.
• Design for the ending of the probes: decide how to follow up after collecting the
probes kit.
As designing a probes kit is like any other small design task, you should try out your probes
kit and adapt the set of exercises when it doesn’t fit your design problem or target group as
anticipated. Through the rich data they provide in the probes kits, your users will actively
give you inspiration for the design process. Finally, you need to communicate the insights to
other design team members or stakeholders—to ensure that the design process takes the
right direction.

Hero Image: Copyright holder: Gunnar Bothner-By. Copyright licence: CC BY / Enhanced
brightness from original
Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, Pieter Jan Stappers, Remko van der Lugt, and Elisabeth B.-N.
Sanders, Context Mapping: Experiences from Practice. CoDesign, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2005,
119–149.
Pieter Jan Stappers, and Elisabeth B.-N. Sanders, Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for
the Front End of Design, 2012.
7 Simple Ways to Get Better Results from

Ethnographic Research
The first step in any User Experience or Design Thinking process should involve getting to know
your users. When starting a project from scratch or moving into a new market, you may not
have any experience or a deep understanding of your users. Ethnographic research, such as user
observation and interviews, will allow you to discover who your users really are, and the
environments in which they live. It will provide great insights into the way that your users will
interact with your product. Here are seven easy things you can do in order to maximise the
effectiveness of your ethnographic research.
There are specific challenges associated with ethnographic research—the main one being
that it’s not a quantitative process. You don’t end up with neat numbers, graphs, and figures.
Instead, it’s a qualitative process, which involves producing a great deal of unruly data that
is hard to summarize. It is also difficult, and some would say impossible, not to let your own
biases or assumptions sneak into the research process.
With this in mind, we have seven simple ideas that should help you get more out of your
investment in ethnographic research:
1. Diversity Matters
When building your research team, you will want to spend some time ensuring the team is
diverse. It’s a good idea to choose team members from a variety of disciplines, as opposed to
team members from a specific background. People with a different mix of backgrounds will
possess a wide range of capabilities and modes of thinking, and this is useful in order to
obtain different interpretations of the observations made by your team. You want input from
the client, the designers, the developers, and, if possible, the ethnographers involved in the
research.
Besides a diversity of disciplines, you should also vary the ethnic, gender, age, etc.
backgrounds of your team members. In fact, Margaret Ann Neale, The Adams Distinguished
Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that increasing
diversity in a team would improve its performance. Furthermore, she found that conflicts in
opinions between diverse team members would spark greater innovation than those in
homogeneous teams.
Besides team diversity, you should also aim for participant diversity. This is especially
important in countries or societies in which there is a sizeable difference in expectations and
roles within people of different genders, race, etc. You should also consider interviewing
your extreme users. For instance, instead of interviewing people who fit into your target
audience, you could also interview fervent fans of the product and people who would never
use the product.
Author/Copyright holder: George A. Spiva Center for the Arts. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0
It would be a dull world if we were all the same. Happily, this diversity offers powerful problem-
solving.
2. Consider Your Subjects

In real life, some people are glass half-empty types, and others are glass half-full types. On
rare occasions, there are people who drink the contents of the glass and then blame its being
empty on someone else. Each of these types of people are likely to experience something in
a different way.
These people may have many things in common, and this is why you need to include them in
your research. A single attribute of their personality may override all common ground. You
need to delve into individual mindsets and understand them in order to understand better
how they contribute to your research. Don’t assume that all members of your target audience
see the world through the same lens. Just because two people share the same DNA, live in
the same part of the world, and speak the same dialect, too, is no guarantee of idiosyncratic
alignment.
3. Give People a Reason to Help You

Good research begins by developing a relationship with the subject. You need to develop a
level of rapport and show some empathy and understanding with that person. When such
people feel comfortable with you, they are much more likely to feel comfortable with
participating in the process.
For example, when the International Development Enterprises (IDE) Ethiopia wanted to
learn more about small holder farmer incomes, the design team decided to stay overnight in
a farmer’s house. They realised that, while one of the farmers was guarded and offered
superficial facts about himself during the first visit, he was shocked to find the team still there
the next morning. Thereafter, his behaviour around the team changed, and he started telling
them about his long-term plans for improving his life. The design team’s staying overnight
showed the farmers that they genuinely cared for the farmers, and were there to help the
farmers in the long run, rather than offer them short-term handouts.
Take time to introduce yourself, explain what’s going to happen, and invite questions from
the start. Try to illustrate through the process that what the person is saying/doing is
important and of value to you.
4. Let People Explain Why They Feel or Do Something

Most researchers are likely to be intelligent people. This leads to the natural tendency to
assume that they can explain what is seen or heard. This is a bad way to conduct research.
No matter how bright your team mates may be, they are not the subject. Rather than guessing
or assuming the reasons behind people’s behaviour—you should ask the people to explain
things for themselves. You should listen to the answer, figure out what is not being said, and
observe their body language. It may be because of pride, or perhaps it’s because of trouble
finding the right words. Sometimes, their answers can reveal sharp insights about the
problems they are facing.
Use the 5 Whys Method
A simple model is the “5 Whys” method: quite literally, asking your users “Why?” whenever
they explain their behaviours to you. Each time you ask “Why?”, you will prompt someone to
re-evaluate their position in order to dig a little deeper into their own reasoning. It may seem
a little odd to keep asking “Why?” at first, but it will bring great insights while allowing you
to dig deeper in order to find the root cause(s) of their behaviours.
You can download the “Five Whys” template here.
5. Keep an Eye on the Physical Context

The experience of using any product or service isn’t just about a person’s preferences. It’s
also about the environment in which that product may be used. Are there obstacles present
in the settings where they perform their tasks? If somebody spends his or her life wearing
thick rubber gloves, your sophisticated touch-screen interface may not work very well.
Learn to video or photograph your ethnographic research. You can then go back and look at
things such as body language and the environmental interactions that may govern a response
as well as affect how they use your product or service.
6. Don’t Start with Solutions in Mind

The easiest way to introduce bias into your research is to have a solution in mind. It will
guide your questioning, observations, and understanding in the direction you want rather
than the direction of your users, and you may not even realize it. As the great Sherlock
Holmes (or rather, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) once quipped:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.”
– Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
It is much better to conduct the research first, and once complete, you can use the data you’ve
obtained in order to develop solutions. This doesn’t mean that you can’t introduce solutions
in ethnographic research (user testing is important, after all), but it does mean introducing
those ideas at an appropriate time once you’ve had a chance to observe your users, without
bias. Always keep in mind that the first step in any User Experience, Human-centred Design,
or Design Thinking process is to get to know your users.
7. Map Insights and Check for Objectivity

When you analyse your research, at first, it’s a good idea for everyone to generate ideas
separately. You can write these on Post-It notes and stick them to a wall. This will enable you
to group together common ideas easily for the team to examine. What are the reasons for
needing different team member insights? Are these insights based upon the same data? If
not, do the differing data points still make sense when compared against each other? While
all interpretations as to why people behaved the way they did are subjective, they should be
based on objective facts and observations.
Your solutions should come from the review process. Don’t be afraid to undertake this
process multiple times—and don’t be afraid to mix up participants.
You can download the template for Affinity Diagrams here.

Author/Copyright holder: Unknown. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown.
As you can see, the road to clear solutions in design is never straight.
The Take Away

Ethnographic research can add huge value to User Experience design and Design Thinking
processes because it is essentially Human-centred. It’s important to focus on and empathise
with the people you design for, and truly listen to and understand them, rather than
concentrating on your expected process outcomes.
You need to be aware of potential sources of bias and take care to eliminate them. You will
also need as diverse a team as possible in order to obtain the best insights. Keeping the seven
ways of enhancing your ethnographic research in mind will enable you to maximise what
you can learn from your users.

Stanford Graduate School of Business, Diverse Backgrounds and Personalities Can Strengthen
Groups, 2006: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diverse-backgrounds-personalities-
can-strengthen-groups
IDEO, Human-Centered Design Toolkit, 2009: https://www.ideo.com/by-ideo/human-
centered-design-toolkit
Hero Image: Author/Copyright info: Unknown. Copyright terms and licence: Unknown.
How to Conduct User Interviews
User interviews can be a great way to extract information from users for user experience
understanding, usability understanding and ideation. They are cheap and easy to conduct
and can be readily conducted by anyone who can ask questions and record the answers.
Author/Copyright holder: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
Before we look at how to conduct user interviews, we need to take a look at some of the
drawbacks of interviewing:
• Interviews, even if they are contextual (e.g. based on observing the interviewee using
the product prior to interview), tend to give insights into what people say they will
do and this is sometimes (often even) not the same as what they actually do
• Human beings have memory issues and can often not recall details as clearly as they
would like. Unfortunately, it is a human tendency to try and create these details (this
is not even a conscious process) and to tell a story the way we think something
happened rather than how it happened.
• Users aren’t designers. Interviews should stick to concrete examination of what is
happening and how the user feels. They should not try and get the user to create their
ideal product or to suggest improvements.
It’s important to keep these drawbacks in mind when designing your interview questions
(or indeed – when making up interview questions on the spot when examining what you
have observed the user doing). You should also take them into account when evaluating a
group of user interviews – interview data gives you a starting point to examine problems but
rarely a finishing point which delivers 100% certainty as to what to do next.
Arnie Lund, the author of User Experience Management, said; “Know thy user, and you are
not they user.” User interviews are a great way to get to know your users.
What is a User Interview?

User interviews are where a researcher asks questions of, and records responses from, users.
They can be used to examine the user experience, the usability of the product or to flesh out
demographic or ethnographic data (for input into user personas) among many other things.
Author/Copyright holder: Liz Danzico. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.
The ideal interview takes place with two UX researchers and one user. The first UX
researcher focuses on asking questions and guiding the interviewee through the interview.
The second takes notes. If a second researcher is unavailable for this – then videoing or audio
recording an interview can be a good way to record the information elicited. If the researcher
asking questions takes notes – there’s a good chance that the interview will be derailed and
become hard to manage.
Typical topics covered within user interviews include:

• Background (such as ethnographic data)
• The use of technology in general
• The use of the product
• The user’s main objectives and motivations
• The user’s pain points
Don’t feel limited to these topics. If there’s something you need to know that you can learn
by asking your users (as long as it’s not offensive or threatening) you can ask a question
about it.
There is also a special type of user interview known as the contextual interview. This is an
interview which is conducted after (or during) the observation of a user using the actual
product. It’s an interview “in context” with usage. These are very common in usability testing
and assessment of products and even in information visualization.
Author/Copyright holder: RezScore. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use
Preparing for User Interviews

Preparation for user begins with recruitment; you want to ensure that you recruit a
representative sample of users for your interviews.
Then you will need to create a script to ask questions from (unless you are doing a contextual
interview in which case you may still create a script but are likely to wander off-piste from
that script a lot during the interview).
Some tips for your script include:

• Make sure you begin by explaining the purpose of the interview – what are you trying
to achieve?
• Also explain how the person’s data and any data you collect will be used from the
interview.
• Try to keep leading questions to a minimum. A good question is “Do you use instant
messaging?” rather than “How often do you use Snapchat?” The former lets you
explore what the user actually does. The latter presupposes that user is working with
Snapchat and that’s the extent of their instant messaging activity.
• Keep it reasonably short. If you read the script aloud and it takes more than 10
minutes to read… it’s probably too long. Interviews should, ideally, be less than 1 hour
long and the majority of the time spent should be the interviewee talking and the
researcher listening.
Don’t forget that scripts are a guide not a bible. If you find something interesting takes place
in an interview and there are no questions, on the script, to explore that idea… explore it
anyway. Feel free to amend the script for future uses.
When scheduling your interviews, it’s a good idea to leave 30 minutes or so between each
interview, it gives the interviewer some time to make additional notes and compile their
thoughts while everything is still fresh in their mind.
How to Conduct a User Interview

Conducting an interview is simply a question of running through your script or asking the
questions that you have. However, there are some tips to make this more useful as a process:
• Make your interviewee comfortable – dress in a manner similar to them (you in a

suit them in a tracksuit is going to make it feel like a job interview rather than a user
test), make sure they understand you are testing a product or an idea and not the user
themselves, offer them a drink (non-alcoholic), conduct a little small talk (but only a
little) before you start, etc.
• Try to keep the interview on time and heading in the right direction – the reason
scripts are useful is because you can reference them for this
• Try to focus on the interviewee and not on note making – it’s just plain rude to
bury your head in your notes. Maintain eye contact, keep a conversation flowing and
record the interview rather than getting lost in note making.
• Thank the interviewee at the end of the process – not only is this polite but you
can offer a chance for the interviewee to ask any question of their own at this point
too.
Author/Copyright holder: Victorgrigas. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0
Reporting on User Interviews

User interviews tend to provide qualitative rather than quantitative data. Compiling the
results of many interviews can be challenging. Word clouds and mind maps are two good
ways of presenting qualitative data in an interesting but easy to understand format. Written
reports are fine but try to contain them to the key data and leave all the minor stuff in
appendices.
You can download the template for Conducting an Interview with Empathy here.
The Take Away

User interviews are a cheap and easy way to get data “straight from the horse’s mouth”.
However, it’s important to bear in mind that there are limitations to this technique and you
may discover what people say they do rather than what they actually do. Conducting
interviews is simple. Write a script and go through it with the user. Make sure to keep the
user informed and comfortable as you do.
References
Some additional tips on user interviews from the Nielsen Norman Group
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interviewing-users/
Why listening to users isn’t always the right thing to do also from the Nielsen Norman Group
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-rule-of-usability-dont-listen-to-users/
Some ideas for questions in user interviews - https://medium.com/user-research/never-

ask-what-they-want-3-better-questions-to-ask-in-user-interviews-aeddd2a2101e -
.izil93jqf
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: David Davies. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA
2.0
Question Everything
Research can be compared to interacting with the ocean. On the surface, we may see calm
beauty or turbulence; however, we can only fully understand the bigger picture once we
submerge ourselves and go much deeper. In order to gain a holistic, empathic understanding of
our users and the problem we are trying to solve, we need to question everything, even things
that we think we know the answers to.
What Kind of Dive?

Working with the metaphor of diving and water, let's consider the following information-
gathering techniques or missions. These may be based on the requirements of the occasion,
or on the confidence of the actors.
• Watch the surface for clues

• Fish for something below the surface
• Go for a little dip to see what's below
• Snorkel to what's going on down there
• Deep sea dive to explore the deeper wonders
• Dive into the unknown, submarines and all, to discover never before seen treasures
Author/Copyright holder: kbossey. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-ND 2.0
Take a deep breath and immerse yourself in your user’s environment and lives.
Design Thinking Has Its Own Systems and Subjects of Analysis

Idris Mootee, CEO of international strategic innovation firm Idea Couture, cautions in his
book, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation, that we should not consider Design
Thinking’s and ethnographic research methods of gathering information as the antithesis of
analytical data-driven thinking. He argues in his book, which focuses on the application of
Design Thinking within a more strategic business setting, that Design Thinking has its
own mode of analysis, with a focus more weighted towards relationships, behaviour, and
human interaction.
Mootee lists seven areas in which Design Thinking aims to analyse, using its own unique
methods of enquiry and data collection, so as to determine:
1. How a product, service, system, or business currently lives in an ecosystem.

2. How people interact with the above, and the nature, frequency, and attributes of that
interaction.
3. How the different elements in the ecosystem relate to one another and if any systems-
level impacts exist.
4. What other ecosystems exist adjacent to your ecosystem.
5. How new insight may be gained by looking broadly at communicative events within
these ecosystems and how they fit together from a systems perspective.
6. What the key characteristics and patterns of behaviour of new relationships are when
viewed from a systems level.
7. What the patterns of people's information behaviours are and how to map them
visually to make sense of them.
Bestselling author and expert in design, creativity and innovation, Marty Neumeier, in his
book MetaSkills, shares a similar set of areas for innovation. These areas for innovation,
derived from a study by the global innovation firm Doblin, are:
1. The business model, or how the enterprise makes money.

2. Networking, including organizational structure, the value chain, and partnerships.
3. Enabling processes, or the capabilities the company buys from others.
4. Core processes, or the proprietary methods that add value.
5. Product performance, including features and functionality.
6. Product systems, meaning the extended system that supports the product.
7. Service, or how the company treats customers.
8. Channels, or how the company connects its offerings to its customers.
9. Branding, or how the company builds its reputation.
10. Customer experience, including the touch points where customers encounter the
brand.
From the above lists of possible focus areas, it is clear that we need to dig deeper into the
problems we are trying to solve in order to better understand where value may be needed,
and from where we can extract the maximum value.
The IDEO got its very aptly named Deep Dive method in this exploration which is now owned
and implemented at Deloitte, the parent company of the Doblin Group.
Hunting for a Scent

Like our hunting ancient ancestors exploring the surrounding territory for clues of target
prey, we too are hunters and gatherers, but of a different kind. As designers, we're constantly
on the prowl, seeking to uncover new signs and signals that lead to making a catch.
We need to hone our skills at picking up strong signals, which may require urgent action, or
weak signals that indicate an opportunity or threat in the near future. We need to immerse
ourselves in the environment around us, and block out the background noise in order pick
up those key signals that will lead to a breakthrough.
The Purpose of Gathering Information
The purpose of gathering data is not merely to obtain a quantity of research data, but to
study what comes out of the data, be it broad or deep. The purpose of gathering data is to
extract insights that will inform us of the path ahead, and for us to gather the right amount
and quality of information for our intended purpose. As a designer, you can gather two types
of research data:
• Quantitative – breadth of data: statistics, demographics, analytics, surveys, and

customer feedback forms
• Qualitative – depth of insight: exploratory, focus groups, interviews, observations,
photo/video journals, photo/video user-based studies
At times, you may need to rely more on quantitative data and less on qualitative data. Each
challenge will require a different research focus and will be based on the sought outcome
type.
Quantitative research involves a scientific and statistical approach. As such, you should use
quantitative research to understand an average of factors. It can provide insights in terms of
the choices and behaviours that the majority of people take, but it is unable to verify the exact
reasoning or human factors motivating these decisions. Qualitative research, however,
attempts to understand the human and social phenomena much more deeply, on a case-by-
case basis. However, it may not provide a wide enough view of things. You should use the
two types of research in tandem, with varying degrees of emphasis, depending on the types
of insight required.
The Importance of Primary Immersion
Some people refer to the initial data-gathering phase as immersion or primary immersion, a
necessary kick-start process in which those embarking on the Design Thinking journey take
a "deep dive" into the challenge space and everything associated with it.
Becoming deeply familiar with the information allows the serendipitous connections and
insights to form more easily in the minds of the Design Thinking team. It's about familiarising
the mind with the available stimuli and then setting the scene for disrupting the data in new
and unconventional ways that may reveal new patterns.
The Five Whys Method
The Five Whys is an iterative interrogation technique used to uncover the root causes of
problems. Getting past the superficial understanding of what needs to be solved and
addressing problems at the root is a more holistic way of ensuring that the solution actually
works at the appropriate level, and the Five Whys method can help you in achieving that.
Quite simply, the Five Whys method necessitates you to ask your interviewee “Why?”—
repeatedly—in order to dig deeper and arrive at the root causes of needs, emotions, and
behaviours.
The Five Whys method is a technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the Japanese inventor
and industrialist who founded Toyota Industries, and Taiichi Ohno, who is considered to be
the father of the Toyota Production System. Toyota implemented this technique as part of its
manufacturing methodologies in order to reveal root causes of problems within the
manufacturing system.
The technique has since been adopted into a wide range of problem-solving methodologies
because of its simplistic nature and adaptability.
An example often used by Taiichi Ohno goes as follows:
1. "Why did the robot stop?"

The circuit has overloaded, causing a fuse to blow.
2. "Why is the circuit overloaded?"
There was insufficient lubrication on the bearings, so they locked up.
3. "Why was there insufficient lubrication on the bearings?"
The oil pump on the robot is not circulating sufficient oil.
4. "Why is the pump not circulating sufficient oil?"
The pump intake is clogged with metal shavings.
5. "Why is the intake clogged with metal shavings?"
Because there is no filter on the pump.
Drilling down into your problems is a good way to prepare for the appropriate framing of
the challenge at hand. Even if you won't directly be tackling the core issue, understanding
what it is helps address the level you're working on with a much deeper understanding.
The Take Away

Most of what we can see at the first glance about a problem is only what’s on the surface. In
order to create solutions that truly impact our users, however, we need to dig deep into the
root of the problem, and the drivers, needs, and motivations of our users. In other words, we
should question everything. We should gather information — both quantitative and
qualitative — and use what we have learnt to inform our problem-solving process. Lastly,
the Five Whys method is a simple but extremely useful way to get to the root of a problem or
issue.

Idris Mootee, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can't Teach You at Business
or Design School, 2013
Marty Neumeier, Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age, New Riders,
2014: http://www.liquidagency.com/metaskillsbook/
Doblin Group, The Doblin Group Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building
Breakthroughs, 2013: http://www.doblin.com/tentypes/#framework
Learn more about the difference between quantitative and qualitative research in this
YouTube video by Android Developers: UXD: LeanUX Measurement - Qualitative and
Quantitative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SNSA6pmzjM
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Jonathan Simcoe. Copyright terms and licence: CC0
The Power of Stories in Building Empathy

Storytelling plays a huge role in User Experience design and in the Design Thinking process.
Storytelling creates a compelling narrative around the people we’re designing for so that we as
designers can develop a deep and emotional understanding of their motivations and needs.
Stories have the ability to form a common thread throughout a project, so team members can
stay focussed and inspired. Stories are a great way to infuse empathy into your design project,
and can be extremely useful for design thinkers. Here we’ll tell you about the elements of good
storytelling, as they were taught by Aristotle, and we’ll go into the various design methods you
can employ to enable stories to be a part of your design project.
Tim Brown, CEO of international design and innovation firm IDEO, advocates the use of
stories to enhance a design thinking project:
“It is essential that storytelling begins early in the life of a project and be woven into every
aspect of the innovation effort. It has been common practice for design teams to bring writers
in at the end to document a project once it has been completed. Increasingly they are building
them into the design team from day one to help move the story along in real time.”
– Tim Brown, Change by Design
It is no wonder that many of the ethnographic research methods which design thinkers use
in the first stage of the Design Thinking process, the “Empathise” stage, involve some form
of storytelling. To understand the true power of stories and why they teach us so much about
the people we study, we can turn to the ancient teacher of storytelling, Aristotle.
Aristotle’s 7 Elements of Good Storytelling

Author/Copyright holder: Giovanni Dall’Orto. Copyright terms and licence: Free to use.
Aristotle, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great, knew a great deal about life, the
universe and everything... and more than a fair deal about putting together stories.
Aristotle’s seven elements of good storytelling will help us empathise with the people we
design for by asking the right questions. Asking the right questions will help us understand
and tell the most essential stories about our users’ needs, motivations, and problems.
Although initially written to describe the elements of good theatre (novels had not yet been
invented yet), Aristotle’s writings on theatre are nonetheless widely used in general
storytelling. Aristotle’s points can also show us how storytelling can help
increase empathy in a Design Thinking project.
1. Plot
What are the character(s) doing? What are they trying to accomplish? The story plot tells us
about a person’s change in fortune (either from good to bad, or from bad to good), and is
usually about overcoming some kind of obstacle or challenge. In a Design Thinking project,
the story plot tells us about struggles and how people try to improve aspects of their lives.
2. Character
Who are the people? What are their traits, their personalities? What are their backgrounds,
needs, aspirations, and emotions? Storytelling in Design Thinking, most obviously, relates to
gaining an empathic understanding of the people for whom we are designing. When we tell
stories about our users, it is not sufficient to know facts about them, like their appearances
or income; for a fully fleshed out character, we need insights into their needs, motivations,
and emotions.
3. Theme
Why are you, the design thinker, undertaking the project? Why are the people you are
studying doing what they are doing? The theme of a story tells us the overarching obstacle
that needs to be crossed, or the end goal of the project. Use a theme to help keep yourself
focussed and provide your team with a strong narrative to keep you going.
4. Dialogue
What are the people saying? Do they say different things when you observe them as
compared to when you interview them? How are they saying it? Are they angry,
disappointed, sad, or happy? While observing their dialogue, are you losing focus on the
things they did not say? People often convey so much more in what they don’t say, compared
to what they actually vocalise.
Dialogue is also a two-way process: it is crucial to keep track of how we, the observers, speak
to the people we are observing. Having a superior or condescending tone when conversing
with our users is a sure way to get their guards up and put a limit on how much we can learn
from them.
5. Melody/Chorus
To be effective, your stories should have a pleasant “melody”, a chorus that resonates with
your emotions and convictions. The power of storytelling often lies in its ability to stir
emotion and motivate us to find a solution. When you design a solution with empathy, the
story you present to your users will also help drive its success.
6. Décor
Décor is about the setting. It’s about the physical environment in which your characters
perform their acts. What’s the décor, setting, and physical environment in which your users
perform their acts like? Effective storytelling does not ignore the setting, because often the
interactions between characters and the set will tell us a lot about their motivations and
behaviours. As a design thinker, you should pay attention to the opportunities or obstacles
present in your users’ environments.
7. Spectacle
Are there any plot twists in your stories? Any unexpected insights about your users? The
spectacle is something that the audiences who listen to your story will remember, and will
generate discussions and ideas. If your design thinking story includes a spectacle, it will be a
powerful tool to drive the project forward.
Knowledge is captured in Stories
Aristotle’s seven elements of good storytelling show how a good story can not only allow us
to have an empathic understanding of our users, but how it will also motivate the design
team to push forward in search of a design solution. In fact, Mark Zeh, design leader at IDEO
and Bose, says:
“Knowledge is captured in stories. Stories are the foundation of the process for examining a
customer need and how they are behaving.”
– Mark Zeh
You can download a template for Aristotle’s 7 Elements of Good Storytelling method here.
How to add Storytelling into your Design Thinking Process

Stories are powerful tools that can inspire action, but how do you incorporate stories into
your Design Thinking process? The Institute of Design at Stanford (or d.school) encourages
a few methods that design thinkers can use in order to take advantage of the power of stories.
We will examine two of them below — story share-and-capture and the journey map, and
you will also find templates that you and your team can easily start using.
Story Share-and-Capture
A story share-and-capture session is usually undertaken after ethnographic research—i.e.,

using design thinking methods such as “conducting interviews with empathy”, “building
empathy with analogies”, and asking the “5 why’s.” In a story share-and-capture session,
team members share the observations they each made in the field in the form of stories. Each
member will share what they observed, and the rest of the team will note down interesting
insights or quotes from the story.
This process allows the team to be on the same page when it comes to progress in
understanding users. It also allows for discussions about the stories that each person has
seen and heard, which enables the team to dig deeper into the meanings behind
observations.
You can download a template for the story share-and-capture method here.
Journey Map
A journey map is a detailed record of a user’s experience of doing something. It could either
be constructed based on your observations and interviews with the user, or it could be
something that you ask the user to draw out and explain. It would contain a journey that the
user goes through, and could be either closely relevant or even tangential to the focus of your
project.
For instance, you could document the journey of a user’s experience of waking up in the
morning and making their way to work via public transport. Try to be as comprehensive as
possible, rather than filtering out details that you assume to be meaningless or irrelevant.
You could organize the journey map in whatever way you think is most effective, from a
timeline to a series of images.
A journey map can help you build empathy towards your users as you try to experience what
they go through. It can also uncover insights, such as when you compare journeys between
users to find common threads or find conflicting behaviours within a user’s journey.
You can download a template for creating a journey map here.
Storytelling and Design Thinking – When Should You Tell

Stories?
Stories can be a great help when you seek to develop empathy with your users, but they are
not restricted to the Empathise stage of the Design Thinking process. In fact, you should use
storiesthroughout the Design Thinking process and other Human-centred design processes.
For example, you should tell stories when you create prototypes for users and when you try
to figure out how the prototype is supposed to fit into users’ lives. It will often be a great idea
to tell stories when you explain the prototypes to users when you’re testing them. Mary
Catherine Bateson, writer and cultural anthropologist, sums it up beautifully in a sentence:
“The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”

– Mary Catherine Bateson
The Take Away

Stories play a significant role in the Design Thinking process. A story constructs a narrative
so that we can gain a deep and emotional understanding of our users. It allows us to pay
attention to various aspects of the users, including their environment, their needs, desires
and problems, and allows us to design Human-centred solutions that meet their needs.
Aristotle’s seven elements of good storytelling should always be applied to the Design
Thinking process; doing so, we can have a holistic and well-rounded comprehension of our
users. These seven elements will help us to observe and tell the essential stories—and there
are also several methods, such as story share-and-capture and journey mapping, which
enable us as design thinkers to take advantage of the power of storytelling so as to build
empathy with our users.
Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires
Innovation, 2009
Chad McAllister, Innovation Excellence, How Design Thinking Uses Story and Prototyping,
2015: http://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2015/10/19/how-design-thinking-uses-
story-and-prototyping/
d.school Bootcamp Bootleg, 2013: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-

content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation.
Copyright licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

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Lesson 3-DT

3.1: The Power of Empathy

References & Where to Learn More

Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy

Empathy is an important element in Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design. What is

What Is Empathy Exactly?

In Design Thinking, empathy is, as explained in IDEO’s Human-Centred Design Toolkit, a

• Assume a beginner’s mindset

Empathy vs. Sympathy

What They Say and What They Don't Say

In other words, we need empathy so as to understand people thoroughly. Empathy is the

Empathy is Crucial to Business Success

From a purely business profit-driven perspective, empathy is an essential component of any

As Frank Chimero, illustrator and author of The Shape of Design, says:

“People ignore design that ignores people”.

Designing Without Empathy: Google Glass

Author/Copyright holder: Antonio Zugaldia. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

Success with Empathy: The Embrace Warmer

Anyone Can Master Empathy

The Take Away

Jane Fulton Suri, Thoughtless Acts?, 2005: https://www.ideo.com/by-ideo/thoughtless-acts

The Embrace Warmer: http://embraceglobal.org/about-us/

IDEO: Human-Centered Design Toolkit, 2009: https://www.ideo.com/work/human-

Psychology Today, The Neuroscience of Empathy,

How to Develop an Empathic Approach in Design

How to be an Empathic Observer

So as to empathise, we need to listen and listen attentively. We need to choose actively to

4. Hone Your Observation skills

Author/Copyright holder: crew.co. Copyright terms and licence: Free to use.

How to Gain an Empathic Understanding of People

Conducting an Interview with Empathy

An analogy is a comparison between two things—for example, a comparison of a heart to a

The Take Away

References & Where to Learn More

d.school Bootcamp Bootleg, 2013: http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-

Empathy – How to Improve Your Designs by

Why is Empathy Important in a Design Process?

The Four Steps in Developing Empathy for your Target Group

How to Collect the Data You Need to Develop Empathy

• Looking at what people really do in their current natural context or with

Author/Copyright holder: Nate Grigg. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

How to Analyse the Data Needed so as to Develop Empathy

Best practice for an analysis process:

The Take Away

Merlijn Kouprie and Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser, “A Framework for Empathy in Design:

Probes for Context Mapping – how to Design and

The Three Stages in the Context Mapping Process and how to

Stage 1. Preparing – How to Prepare Probes for Context

Key questions to help you get started:

The best ways to approach your participants:

• Help them go from descriptive to imaginative. By starting with gathering some

Key questions to help you end the probes:

• How will you collect the probes kit?

Example of a bad Probes Kit

Example of a good Probes Kit

Best Practices: Three Types of Probes that usually Work well

Stage 2. Collecting – The Main Stage

Stage 3. Communicating – the Final Stage

The Take Away

References & Where to Learn More

7 Simple Ways to Get Better Results from

2. Consider Your Subjects

3. Give People a Reason to Help You