Empathy Phase – Complete Guide to Design Thinking

[shukla7789]

We face many choices in our daily lives, as well as at work. Asking questions during our tasks and responsibilities allows us to find the right path to follow. And the same goes for empathy – one of the steps in creating products and services using the design thinking method. Today, we will explain why the empathy step in design thinking is so important.

Empathy stage – index:
Design thinking
Empathy stage in design thinking
Tools used in the empathy stage
Key points to note during the empathy stage
Design thinking
Design thinking is an approach to creating new products and services based on a bolivia whatsapp number database understanding of a problem and the needs that users face. It consists of 5 steps:

Empathize
Define the problem
Generate ideas
Build prototype
Test
Later, if the project passes the tests, all that remains is to launch it on the market as one of our products.

Empathy stage in design thinking
In psychology, empathy is defined as feeling the feelings of others ( emotional empathy ) and being able to see the world through another person's eyes. It is the first, but probably also the most important element of the entire design thinking methodology.

During the initial research, the entire team tries to go through their customer’s journey and see what they find problematic. The task is to “ become the customer/user ”, analyze the problem that helps to visualize the collected suggestions. The two most important questions at this stage are:

“Who are we designing for?”
“What are your needs?”
Simply seeing the user’s needs isn’t enough, however – you also need to empathize with the user . That way, we become curious about their experiences and thoughts.

It is important to establish a research schedule , and each researcher should feel supported by others and know their role in the team.

Infographic of the empathy stage in Design Thinking
Tools used in the empathy stage
The most important thing in research is to reveal your intentions as little as possible, because people tend to avoid critical comments. Therefore, a simple survey or interview will not work with this methodology. Tools used during the empathy stage of design thinking include:

Empathy map
Ethnographic interview
Field observation
The empathy map makes it possible to systematize the information collected and see which aspects should be revisited if the selected material is not comprehensive enough. A visualization of the collected propositions is definitely useful in this case.

Each interview should be conducted carefully. Questions should not arise during the interview and the answers should not be too suggestive. Prepared in advance, the interview needs to be properly recorded so that all the reactions and emotions evoked during the interview are collected and saved as data.

Observation should be conducted in a way that is almost imperceptible to the user. It is important that he feels comfortable in the given environment and does not change anything while carrying out his daily activities. This helps to learn more about his world and the problems he encounters along the way.