Empathy — The Most Important Quality Of A UX Researcher

With so many people living on this planet, we have diverse perspectives and opinions, yet we are so well bonded with one another. We laugh together and share the pain together of our loved ones. How are we able to understand others’ feelings while being separate individuals? The superpower is called EMPATHY.

Empathy simply means being able to understand how the other person really feels. It’s when we put ourselves in other’s shoes and see the world from their point of view. And fortunately, having empathy comes naturally to us in case of our family and closed ones because we care for them.

Now, when we build something for users, it’s important that we know how they feel about what we offer them. We can only understand them when we care for them. When we truly care for someone, empathy comes naturally. So, for UXRs, empathy plays an important role. Only when you truly care for the users, you would want to offer them the best they need and this requires empathizing with users all the time. We build for users so understanding them first is the secret to success.

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy” — George Eliot

Empathy map is a technique used to understand users clearly. It gives you very clear perspective of what users really want and need. Empathy map is nothing but recording what users think, feel, says and does. Below are the two most commonly used templates to create an empathy map.

These simple templates help us organize user’s data clearly to have better understanding of user’s experiences. It is important to jot down exactly what the user’s says, feels, think, does, hears and sees without adding our own assumptions which is why empathy is so important for user researchers.

Empathy helps you understand user’s mental models to define right problem statement and come up with most relevant solutions.

The only way you can empathize with your users is to truly care about their needs, pain points and motivations. Users first always!