Empathy and Designing for the Humans
Introduction
I once read a quote that said “the designer(s) the of Singapore (Changi) Airport would make a great experience designer. I had travelled there once when I was young, and I would whole-heartedly agree. It seemed as though everything had been thought of! Every aspect of this new terminal was beautiful and functional (if need be), and now as a designer - I find myself thinking how empathetic this designer (Moshe Safdie & team) must have been. This airport was a great source of inspiration, one of those things that just gets you feeling inspired or creative. However, this was an area of design that I thought, was inspirational and beautiful, was not applicable to the work I did as a UI/UX/Product Designer.
Background
Let me paint a quick scene…
22 years old, landing a dream internship in New York City a few months after graduation. The organization was incredibly intriguing to me. Not only were they an advertising agency, but a design agency focused on “future-proof marketing, experience design, and experiential marketing.” Beyond that, their main focus? Human experience.
Before I continue to dive into HX (Human Experience), I will recognize that HX is inherently different from UI (User Interface), UX (User Experience), and CX (Customer Experience), though they are each parts of what I consider to be an orchestra of tools that work together. Regardless, my focus here is not to highlights the processes and techniques specific to HX, but the fundamental idea of designing for humans.
Designing for the Human Experience
As a previous UI designer, UX designer, and Product Designer, us designers often throw around the terms “user-centric” and “designing for users.” Rightfully so, of course. However, though I know it is my duty as an experience designer to be designing for the user, I find the term “user” to be de-humanizing. In these roles, I was able to utilize processes and research methods to make user-centered solutions. However, something clicked in me once I became an Experience Designer for a HX design agency. Suddenly, the term “human-experience” was central to all of my work. Conversations in meetings would ground itself on “what would these people be feeling” and “how will this impact their life?”
Regardless of the discipline and cookie cutter labels, designers need to be empathetic. For me, this greater idea of designing for humans has allowed me to do just that. There is something deeply more humanizing about the mere terminology behind designing for humans, not just end-users.
Experience designers continually talk about empathy. Typically, we associate creating empathy through user-centric research. There are research process and techniques that allow our work to design solutions for users, but there is a mere lack of true, genuine empathy. This is a topic that is not specific to the experience design community, but one that is applicable to every field of work, and just humans in general. With the rise of social media and technology in general, a lack of empathy is something that has been declining. I find the juxtaposition of designing digital products & humans experiences with empathy and these products also being the ones that are encouraging the decline of empathy and human connection in our world to be quite ironic, but that is another rabbit hole I’ll save for another day.
Can empathy be taught?
I have constantly juggled with the idea - can empathy be taught or is it something people just have? I have come to understand that like most things in your life, or things that relate to your brain at least, can be taught and developed (something my dad would be incredibly impressed with, as I reach closer to 25 and a fully developed frontal lobe).
While I cannot tell an abundant audience how to be empathetic in a single use-case, I will say that the greatest practice of empathy I have learned is to have genuine connections to humans and an eagerness and curiosity for people and their stories. Find things to absorb in your life that allows you to hear stories that make you feel inspired to connect with people. In the lense of a designer, I hope to bring this to the forefront of more conversations to create better humans experience designs.
Resources
Here are some items that inspire me (as a designer)
Config 2024: Opting for the opposite (Josh Wardle, Gremco Industries, Creator of Wordle) | Figma
How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business
Here are some items that inspire me (as a person curious to understand and empathize with the world around them)
