Session: DTM-04-01 - Inclusive Design

Paper Number: 89413

89413 - Does Empathising With Users Contribute to Better Need Finding? 

In user-centered product design and development, empathizing with users is an effective way to step into the users’ shoes metaphorically. Ideally, it helps designers understand the users better and in more depth. However, the degree to which an accurate empathic understanding contributes to need finding and what exactly constitutes a good need remain unclear. In this study, 13 designers watched a standard stimulus contextual user interview, performed an empathic accuracy task, and identified user needs basing on the video. The identified needs from all participants were affinitized and summarized into a set of 23 user needs. These needs were scored for overall need quality consisting of importance and satisfaction with current solutions, as well as for need depth and latency. Designers’ empathic understanding was measured as their empathic accuracy of inferring the users’ mental contents and their accuracy of inferring the user’s emotional tone. The designer’s emotional tone accuracy correlated with their performance of identifying important needs and the needs that users feel most satisfied. No correlations were found for the empathic understanding of mental contents. Need depth or latency was not found to correlate with any empathic understanding measure. These results are among the first to link empathy and the designers’ performance in need finding, but further studies are needed to replicate and validate the results. 

Presenting Author: Jie Li Aalto University

Presenting Author Biography: I am a PhD candidate and researcher from Aalto University, Finland. My expertise includes empathic design, user understanding and knowledge transforming during the entire design process.

Authors:

Jie Li Aalto University
Katja Hölttä-Otto The University of Melbourne Parkville