Unpopular opinion alert: UX designers talk way too much about empathy (and its new gerund cousin - empathizing).
Many people and groups (the Stanford D School is one off the top of my head), claim it is the most important thing about being a designer. If you find a UX professional or student trying to explain what they do to someone outside the field, empathy will likely work its way into the conversation within the first minute. Nearly everybody agrees with the role that empathy plays, leaving me on a sparsely populated island wondering why it is talked about so much.
What evidence do I have that it’s overrated? Simple. I have gone on probably a dozen job interviews in the past 3 years at some really strong UX companies, and the number of times that people have attempted to assess my empathy is 0. No one has asked a single question about empathy. No one has given me a personality quiz to test my empathy, such as the Empathy Quotient. People have asked about my experiences and my approaches to design. Companies have given me sample design exercises to test me. But there has been nothing to see if I have appropriate empathy.
While this is a small sample size, my conversations with others lead me to believe that this is not unusual. You would think that if empathy were essential to being a good UX practitioner, we would find a way to assess it during the interview process. Why would a company let someone into the organization who hasn’t demonstrated their empathy aptitude?
We need to explore why we talk about empathy so much, what we actually mean, and why this is important. The first I will address here. The other two will be in a follow up post.
Empathy has its roots in the early days of the User Experience movement. It became clear that too many software systems were failing and a principal reason was that they were not designed from a user perspective. When the developers were building and creating their software systems, they designed the front end in a manner that either made sense to them or simply verified that the data back end was working as intended. Unfortunately, these solution approaches rarely aligned with how the actual users understood the world. Based on this, yes, empathy is needed to understand that there is another perspective – a perspective that is more valuable than the developers.
There in lies the heart of the matter. Empathy allows us to understand that users and other stakeholders have a valuable perspective. This is incredibly important, but that is all that empathy does (slight exaggeration).
Empathy doesn’t allow us to actually extract the user needs. It doesn’t define which user research methods should be used in which situations. It doesn’t play any role in interpreting what users say and translating those comments into insights. It doesn’t tell us how to design to support these needs. It doesn’t tell us how to make tradeoffs between stakeholder needs. It doesn’t show us how to make compromises when the engineers tell us that coding what we say users need will cost triple the build budget. These are all skills that exist and need to be trained for us to be successful User Experience Designers, and are as important or more important than Empathy for being good at our jobs.
Empathy gets us onto the playing field (to reiterate: very important), but our skills dictate how well we actually do once we get out there. Good design may be built on a foundation of empathy, but having empathy (or empathizing) doesn't mean that good design will actually occur.
In a coming post, I will help define what we actually mean when we use the phrase empathy, and why this matters to our field.