Empathic Design - Empathic Design Process

Empathic Design Process

Leonard and Rayport identify the five key steps in empathic design as:

1. Observation
2. Capturing Data
3. Reflection and Analysis
4. Brainstorming for solutions
5. Developing prototypes of possible solutions

Prototypes, simulation and role-playing are other forms of learning processes, typically used to gather customer feedback to designs that have been developed based on empathic design.

One of the leading practitioners of empathic design is the leading design company IDEO. IDEO believes that "seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears is a critical first step in creating a breakthrough product” IDEO refers to this as "human factors” or "human inspiration” and states that "Innovation starts with an eye”, and in their experience once you start observing carefully, all kinds of insights and opportunities can pop up. IDEO routinely include empathic design in their projects and list the key steps to their method as:

• Understand the market, client, technology and perceived constraints.
• Observe real people in real-life situations to find out what makes them tick, that confuses them, what they like, hate, where they have latent needs not addressed by current products and services.
• Visualize new to the world concepts
• Evaluate and refine the prototype
• Implement the new concept for commercialization.

The empathic model is a technique used to simulate age-related sensory losses to give designers personal experience with how their product performs for users. An example is how designers of a retirement community used empathy tools, such as glasses which reduced their vision and gloves which limited their grip and strength. Suri et al. reported another method of empathic design, involving designers shadowing vision-impaired users. The designer was then were required to utilize non-visual cues to learn about a product by working in a dark environment.

Since its introduction, empathic design techniques for new products were first adopted by automotive and electronic product manufacturing industry. However the techniques have been successfully used by several other organizations for designing innovative products. While the five abovementioned steps are at the foundation of empathic design process, several other techniques are used in combination with these five steps.

A study performed on UK based textile fiber manufacturer, Tencel Limited, by Lofthouse et al., shows that use of the Kano model in combination with the first step of user observation has led to understanding of new insights into how customers really perceived Tencel’s fiber, and enabled the product development team to ‘walk in the shoes’ of the end user. The Kano model offered some insight into which product attributes were perceived to be important to customers. The questionnaires used to seek information from users, an important part of Kano model, were used in multiple focus groups consisting of target customers and multidisciplinary design teams. These focus groups carried the process into next three steps of capturing data, reflection and analysis, and brainstorming. In doing so they developed a so called "journey diagram” to record activities that these groups identified to be necessary to move the project towards its final target.

Jääsko and Mattelmäki have studied user-centered design techniques such as empathic design by means of case studies in which they found extensive use of empathic design techniques when developing innovative patient monitoring instruments in hospitals by Datex-Ohmeda division of Instrumentarium Corporation. Datex-Ohmeda used a new technique called "probing” in combination with observation for gathering instrumental, visual and empathic data from "sensitive settings” – that is, situations and places where design team had no access or the access was only temporary. The probing process consisted of diaries, cameras, and illustrated cards with open questions and tasks for documenting routines, actions, and needs in different use situations.

Brandt and Grunnet have studied the use of drama and props as tools in empathic design process to collaboratively generate and explore innovative design ideas. They argue that use of drama and props may aid in engaging users more directly in the design process, especially during the prototype simulation step.