Empathic User Research: Why It’s Sometimes Better To Not Call It Empathy.

Since 2010 I’m observing empathy as a crucial impact factor of design-led working approaches and design thinking. During the past five years I have constantly been conducting interviews with organizations that integrate design-oriented working styles. Even if companies have very different ways of working with design thinking (DT), the focus on empathy with the user/the customer turned out to always play a crucial role. Independent of size or branch the empathy-led user-centeredness was perceived as the most important aspect of DT (see also Carlgren et al., 2013).
However, the conducted research revealed certain pitfalls when it comes to empathic user centeredness. Let me highlight two of them. 

1. Seeing the own perspective.

During my research I found that employees in their encounters with users oftentimes figure out facts that they already had in mind before. For example, a software developer has a technical solution in mind and the conversations with users only confirm his idea. In many cases that happened due to time constraints: The team had no time to openly interact with users because they had a near deadline for their product in mind. In other cases the reason for it was the insufficient preparation for conducting interviews. Asking open, non-suggestive questions and by this putting back the own perspective is challenging and needs training.

2. Simplifying insights.

Being empathic is not only a “complex way of being”, like the psychologist Carl Rogers put it. It also creates complex information. Of course organizations try to reduce complexity. In my interviews I often found this to be a disturbing fact for employees: They were told to do empathic user research in order to collect a variety of perspectives. But later on they had to create over simplified personas with features that they actually never discovered in reality. This simplification was necessary in order to be able to work with the insights. Employees told me that they do not see the difference to classical statistical market research anymore: They thought empathic user research is about the specialties of users. Now they were again obliged to standardize the user.

If it is not possible to create certain spaces of freedom for the staff, then you’re better of with not calling it empathy. Empathic user research is a normative loaded concept. Because of this it bears the risk of causing dissonances: Employees may realize that they cannot really be empathic with the user due to time/budget constraints. The difference between the ideal of empathic work and the corporate reality then probably leads to dissatisfaction. Empathy needs time for open and curiosity-led encounters. If time is short and pressure of developing a product is high, employees are more likely to see in their conversations with users what they already have in mind.
Empathy is a nice word. But keep in mind that using it can do more harm than good.