Three-Way Compassion for Designers
Theresa Wiseman, a Nursing professor, described in 1996 the four qualities of empathy:
Then in 2013 Brene Brown described the difference between empathy and sympathy, animated nicely by RSA:
If you don’t have time to watch that 3-minute video, here’s a summary:
A doctor who wrote about mental health received an illustration about sympathy and empathy from a Californian high school teacher, Robert Shelton. He broke down further the sympathy-empathy difference into four pieces:
Sympathy, like Brene Brown described, may lead us to Pity. Likewise, Empathy may lead us to Compassion. What distinguishes all four states are the engagement. What Theresa Wiseman described is the engaged empathy or empathy in action, which is Compassion.
As designers we heard this a lot: empathize with your users, or as UX professionals we heard this, too: empathize with your customers. We create things for people to use, so we need to make sure that we have compassion for them. Otherwise we don’t have the intent to relieve their suffering.
Our second job as designers or UX professionals is to communicate user empathy to everyone else who don’t meet users directly. In other words, our project team are also our users and our communication is the thing they need to understand. Here we also need to apply compassion, otherwise we don’t have the intent to communicate in their language.
I can share one experience. One day, I had a bunch of user research insights that I had to communicate to a diverse team involved in the product development. I had a bunch of compassion for users and I needed to communicate that to the team.
To communicate the insights, I tried to conduct a simple workshop with three steps. First, understanding user behavior from the raw stories. Second, understanding user profiles. Third, understanding how profiles influence behaviors.
The result? Some participants still didn’t understand how to digest stories, and some others still didn’t understand how the profiles affect behaviors. In the workshop I heard some Pity type of comments, e.g. how a user could have such an unfortunate profile. The most rewarding feedback came from those who looked forward to further their understanding of user behaviors and to use that learning for designing their product.
I took participant feedback holistically and reflected on it as usual. The reflection allowed me to understand them even deeper. Apparently, I wasn’t empathetic enough for them. I didn’t spend enough effort to really understand where they were, so the workshop was prepared for participants with higher understanding of user-centered design.
The two workshop facilitators could not take the feedback and got really disappointed. Well, that happens when you care so much about a prototype you just developed. Sometimes, no matter how it’s based on users, the user-test may not come back fully positive. Of course, it’s just a first prototype! In that case, you need to be compassionate with yourself. Otherwise, you don’t have the intent to allow yourself to grow.
Over the years of practicing as a designer, I became better and better at being compassionate with myself. This is the direction of compassion most forgotten by everyone, not just designers. I wrote an old note about my “work in progress” state to share that. And recently I discovered the work of Kristin Neff about self-compassion, which might be useful for the intellectual ones.
If you want to read more about Design, Innovation, and Human Behavior please follow Design Strat instead of qonita’s profile 🙂
Three-Way Compassion for Designers
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