As Alfred Adler once said, “Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another”.  As you may recall, going back a couple weeks, empathy is the first, and in my opinion most important, step in the design thinking process.  Many people may know what empathy is, or on the other hand, not even know the difference between empathy and sympathy.  (Sympathy is simply just acknowledging another person’s feelings while empathy is embodying those feelings for yourself and stepping in their shoes for a moment; now you know.)  But what many don’t know is that there are a lot of ways to be empathetic when it comes to this first step.  The collection is methods is called Empathy Research.  A few examples are the Ask What-How-Why, personal photo and video journals, and story share-and-capture methods.  The ones that are going to be mentioned today are: Service Safari, Love Letter/Breakup Information, and Engage with Extreme Users.

Going back to Adler’s quote at the top, each of the following methods takes that quote and runs with it, in my opinion. All the empathy research methods are centered on understanding and empathizing with the users, but these four demonstrate that principle the most.

Here is a brief overview of them:

Service Safari

The first method is called the Service Safari.  For this method a designer or researcher is essentially sent out into the ‘wild’, as if they were a user for the first time.  They are to complete the process from start to finish and document any problems they may encounter.  This is one of the more hands-on methods in the empathy research toolbelt.  It immerses the creator into the lives of the intended users so they can experience first-hand what their users encounter.

Love Letter/Breakup Information

Another method, the Love Letter/Breakup Information, is more of a hypothetical approach that can yield the same results.  When someone writes a love letter, or even a breakup letter, they are usually at their most vulnerable, possibly pouring their heart and soul into it.  Those letters can say things for the writer that they would never say otherwise.  For this exercise, the users write their feelings towards the product.  The product’s vulnerabilities can be exposed in regard to the writer’s feelings.

Engage with Extreme Users

For this method, Engage with Extreme Users, a bell curve needs to be imagined, like the one in the picture above.  The vast majority of users of a product are withing the middle 90%.  On either end, there are 5% of users who are considered ‘extreme’.  They are classified as non-users and heavy users.  Those are who the designers and creators need to focus on, with two questions in mind.  What is keeping the left 5% from using the product?  And what is keeping the right 5% not only using the product, but using it excessively?  When those two questions can be answered to a high degree, the bell curve can be flattened, allowing for more of an even scope of users.