Empathic Design - Characteristics of Empathic Design

Characteristics of Empathic Design

The foundation of empathic design is observation and the goal is to identify latent customer needs in order to create products that the customers don’t even know they desire or, in some cases, solutions that customers have difficulty envisioning due to lack of familiarity with the possibilities offered by new technologies or because locked in an old mindset. Empathic design relies on observation of consumers as opposed to traditional market research which relies on consumer inquiry with the intention to avoid possible biases in surveys and questions, and minimizes the chance that consumers will provide false information.

Observations are carried out by a small team of specialists, such as an engineer, a human-factors expert, and a designer. Each specialist then documents their observations and the session is videoed to capture subtle interactions such as body language and facial expressions.

Learning users’ unarticulated needs through a process of keen observation and interpretation often leads to breakthrough designs. Deszca et al. argue that market forces and competitive pressures in today’s fast paced world are augmenting the importance of product innovation as a source of competitive advantage. They argue that in empathic design techniques, users are almost as involved in product design as designers and engineers. Therefore, such technique, when used effectively, can achieve breakthrough designs in potentially shorter product development cycles. To achieve this, they caution that observation group should consist of several others that simply designers and engineers, including trained anthropologists and/or ethnographers.

Von Hippel’s research strongly supports the theory that customers or users themselves are the source of much innovation. Empathic design using field observation can reveal opportunities to commercialize innovations existing users have already developed to improve products.