The importance of empathy research
Understanding the way we understand other people around us
Image from the Interaction Design Foundation.
Empathy research methods are critically important to not only design work and user experience but to many different aspects of everyday life. Three different methods to empathy research in particular stand out to me, the ask what, how and why method, photo and video journaling and story share and capture. All are good ways for empathy research and are helpful to understand in terms of user experience and design. Empathy research seeks to understand how humans understand and perceive the actions and emotions of others around them and these three methods help us to be able to do that as best as possible.
The ask what, how and why method and framework is a tool that helps in design think and overall empathy research and understanding deeper human motivations, decisions and ideas. This methodology helps to solve various hypotheses that may occur in user experience design and overall decisions made by humans. It helps to understand the deeper motivations that the user may have when it comes to any form of design and moves beyond just the point of observing their specific actions, but also why they do those actions.
Personal photo and video journaling is an empathy research method and technique that helps to understand and document someone’s life and their actions through their everyday decisions. It helps by using one’s own smartphone camera to take photos and videos of what they do throughout their day and then is looked at to see what decisions were made and potentially why. Looking back at the footage recorded by the person and seeing what they did throughout their day or time recording is key to further understanding their actions. This technique may also be better for more modern empathy research studies and more advanced ones.
When looking at the idea of the story share and capture method or technique it’s clear this method may be more complex but can wield very interesting results. It is seen as a more collaborative method to unpack a person’s decisions that are made to really understand the user experience of any decisions made by that user and find patterns that they may create. This can be better for more qualitative studies and more pattern reliant actions and decisions.
Regardless of the methodology behind empathy research and how it is conducted by these various techniques, it is an important thing to be able to do and understand. Whether it is more on the user experience and design side of things or not, it is good to be able to understand and learn why it matters and how important it really is.
