DF Researcher

As a designer, how well are you really able to understand users when you are empathizing with them? Our research shows, some factors may increase or decrease your empathic understanding. Do you know what they are and how do they influence your understanding accuracy? Users are not always thinking about the product during an interview.

In the global economic integration, we do not design products only for local users but for users all over the world. Successful product development depends on how well meet the customer need, how well we understand the users. The diversity of users leads to a diversity of needs.

You may have heard of this equation: growing populations with higher demands and incomes require more natural resources. This has led us to the situation where human-made things, such as consumables, cars, and infrastructure, now exceed all living species’ weight on Earth.

 Today, makerspaces are becoming increasingly popular on university campuses by providing an opportunity to design, fix, and prototype physical artifacts to a growing number of makers. This quick increase in the maker initiatives has also brought up the discussion around environmental impacts of the makerspaces.

User understanding is a key part of empathic design, but have you thought about what happens in the brain when we try to understand another person?

For designers it is important to connect, build trust and a good relationship with the user. Building a relationship has been studied elsewhere. Let’s see what we can learn.

Gaining a deep understanding of users has become important in technology development, helping designers provide useful and successful solutions for the users.  Even though many methods developed for empathic design emphasize direct contact with the user, it is seldom efficient for the whole development team to meet the user.

A newborn begins to cry, inducing her neonatal neighbors to join in an ensemble of high pitch cries. A few years later, that child runs to hug her classmate in pain. As a teenager, she enjoys hanging out with her friends. Sometimes she laughs with them, even though she is not sure what they are

We have started to measure what the user is thinking and it has given us quite a surprising result: we understand them up to 50%. This is significant. We tend to believe that when we talk to users and spend time in their environment, we get good user understanding.

Empathy is part of our everyday life. Empathy allows us to understand others and to feel the joys and sorrows of fictional movie characters as if they were real. Empathic understanding helps us to recognize the needs of other people and can even lead to extreme forms of unselfish behavior. People have even donated their