Ch 3 Blog Response: Empathy
Empathy is looking and seeing things from another person's perspective, as if you're in their situation. An example of this would be what the Embrace team did about the situation of a million babies dying in India every year due to hypothermia.Incubators were very expensive to get. The Hospitals had donated incubators, but the babies who needed them lived in villages far away. So instead of designing another type of incubator, the team decided to come up with something more practical, something fit to help the situation of the mothers in those villages. They made the embrace infant warmer, which is like a sleeping bag with a heating pouch that keeps a baby warm for up to four hours. They had to take it to the village to test it and to understand any possible cultural nuances that might lead mothers to reject the product. Hands-on research like this can change your understanding of the end user, like it did for the Embrace team. They changed their approach from designing for hospitals to designing for mothers in villages. Often in industries and organizations, it's tempting to depersonalize customers; they are seen as nothing more than numbers, statistics, data. This doesn't work when designing for real people. You must see and experience their needs and situation from a personal view, from their perspective. Being close to your end user is critical to the success of a product. When you understand the needs and challenges of the people you're creating solutions for, you come up with more innovative, efficient, and successful products.
Empathy is the ability to see an experience through another’s eyes, see why people do what they do, and what exactly they need. This leads to the most significant innovations. Observing the people you're creating for sparks insights.Hybrid insight is an approach that combines quantitative research into human-centered design, which allows us to embed stories and real experiences into the data, bringing it to life. Empathy means to challenge your preconceived ideas and set aside what you assume is true in order to find out what is actually true, it's like a learning experience. You must focus on the people you're designing for and their needs, rather than what you think they need. While interviewing is an important part of empathy, because it helps us understand the person and their needs, empathy is not just interviewing and asking questions. Another important part of empathy is observation. Observing the person, watching them interact with the product. Some people might not be able to explain exactly what is it that they need, they might lack the self awareness or the vocabulary to explain it. Sometimes, just by watching people and their actions, you can find more than what you could have if you had only interviewed them.
