It seems we have to do the empathy thing like a periodic flare-up of the
plague. We might want to be a little more critical about the whole idea of
empathy and what it means to walk in someone else's shoes.
When we look at someone living in primitive conditions and say, "oh, my god,
those poor people!" then we are experiencing some kind of fellow-feeling,
for sure. But the fact is that we're not putting ourselves in their shoes,
we're putting them in our shoes. Did we ask how they are feeling? No. We
just jumped straight to the conclusion that they must be unhappy because we
would be unhappy. As long as we and the people to whom we are ascribing our
own feelings are very similar, everything's cool. Self-centeredness is not a
big deal when the other is just like you.
The psychological research understands empathy to be, on the other hand, not
the skill of saying, "oh, I know just what you mean!!" or "poor thing, I
feel for you!" but a cognitive skill of attentiveness to another person (a
_tangible_ person whom you can see, hear, or otherwise observe and not a
construct like "earthquake victims" or "shoppers" or "users") and
interpretation of the clues embedded in their behavior so as to enable you
to reconstruct what that other person is in fact experiencing. This is not
to substitute your own feeling for theirs, but to try to understand what
feeling or other experience that person is having. (A good intro to empathy
is Bill Ickes' Everyday Mindreading or you could try the older volume of
scholarly essays Empathic Accuracy that he edited.)
I certainly agree that there is a lot of bad design out there that no decent
designer needs to do any user research to fix or prevent. But it is really
hard to understand how to support the needs of people who don't know what
you know or whose values are different from yours, without observing them in
one way or another.
Let me just offer my favorite example, not from my design experience but
from my time teaching composition to inner-city African-American college
students. They faced an end-of-semester test that demanded they could
exhibit a solid grasp of standard English grammar (as opposed to the black
vernacular) even though nobody, in all their years in school, had ever
wanted to get anywhere near this thorny and politically sensitive issue. A
lot of people failed the test. Feeling bad for them, because in fact they
got shafted in the worst way, was a noble thing I'm sure. I did feel bad for
them. But it was much more important to finally figure out that the standard
instruction to teach subject-verb agreement ("the subject and the verb must
agree in person and in number" which they could all recite from memory) is
not only difficult to understand if nobody has taught you how to find
subjects and verbs in your sentences but is in fact arrant nonsense in and
of itself. It looks like English, but it isn't. You can only decipher it if
you know what "first-person plural" or "second-person singular" stands for.
And _that_ nobody had ever pointed out to my students. If I had to design
something to get them past the hurdle of the end-of-semester test, then I'd
have to know that last little bit, which is the little bit that nobody in
the composition program at my university or in the college-level composition
books had figured out was missing in the students' repertoire.
Feeling something on behalf of another person is easy compared to figuring
out what they know and don't know, what they need and don't need in terms of
their own value system (rather than in terms of your value system), and it
just can't be done by intuition. It takes knowledge, to be got from
research. It's not a design skill, although design skills are required to
come up with a solution that addresses the issues research can surface.
Of course, there's always a fall-back: before you design something for
someone else, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you'll be a mile away
and you'll have their shoes.
Marijke Rijsberman
http://www.interfacility.com
http://landfill.wordpress.com
Donna said:
Some people naturally emphasize with the needs of
others. I think this is a key quality and explains how some people can
design
quality systems without doing as much UCD research, etc.
Petra said:
> I guess it's like we all have emotions and yet some of us (well, not
> me) are much better at empathising with other people's emotions. As
> we all do, I "use" a lot and I find so much of bad user design seems
> to be just mind-boggling thoughtlessness. To give a couple of examples:
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