3 ways to build products users love using empathy
When I started out as a Product Manager, I heard the term “Empathy” a lot more often than any other buzz word in product management. I remember taking a course on User Experience Design and the first process of design thinking was empathy. But over the years, I have come to see many people use this same word in many sentences and scenarios and I just say to myself, “do these people know what empathy really entails”?
Empathy is the backbone of every great user experience. To build great products, you must be willing to understand what your users feel about the problems they have.
Empathy and why it is important
Empathy allows you to feel what others feel without putting you in the same situation they were in that elicited such emotion. You can look at it from the angle of “putting yourself in the shoes of others”. Unlike Sympathy, which can be seen as showing compassion towards someone else, empathy allows you to understand other people’s feelings.
When building great user experiences, empathy not only allows us to understand our user’s frustrations but also their pain, hopes, fears, limitations, and goals enabling us to create solutions that would not just solve our user’s problem but also improve their lives by removing unnecessary friction.
How You Can Apply Empathy in Building Lovable Products
Empathy is not just a buzz word. Empathy is intentional.
Many sources have attributed empathy to the design thinking process. It has always been seen as a soft skill every UX designer should have. But empathy goes beyond just designing products. It can turn the tides for any product manager if applied the right way.
The billion-dollar question here is; “how can my product affect my users not just by improving their experience but also impacting their lives”. Let’s take a look at 3 major ways empathy can enable you to build lovable products.
Empathy In Conducting User Interviews and Persona Documentation
When conducting proper user interviews, you need to listen to your users.
I still remember the first user interview I conducted back in 2018. I walked into the room that day hoping to understand why this user was having difficulties using a product I was managing. I had my questions all written down; they were open-ended questions. But just when I sat down with this user and asked them “could you please tell me why you started using product X when you did?”, I then understood that the goal of each successful user interview was in understanding your user’s experience of the problem not just trying to validate if you need to build the solution or not.
Another way to put it; you should feel what your users feel when they actually talk about their problem. Always try to understand the emotions they exude, the frustration they show when talking about the problem, and the excitement or relief they feel towards a potential solution. Whatever you do, just feel it.
The solution may be different for each user but once you understand the problem and how each user uniquely experiences the problem, you are closer to solving the problem.
In Product Strategy, you define;
- The problem you are trying to solve
- Who you are solving it for
- Why you are solving the problem
- What your solution to the problem is.
When talking about who you are solving it for, you go on to create User Personas and it is important to always put yourself in the shoes of your user to better understand their goals, frustrations, buying motivation, concerns, and habits.
When creating user personas, the goal is to be as accurate about who the user is by imagining ourselves having the same experience as the user. When you create the persona, it is advisable to role-play the user; imagine living their life, working at the place where they work, earning what they earn, having the kind of needs they have. Don’t just understand the persona you are writing about, be the persona by putting yourself in their shoes. Now, how does that feel like? 😏
Always visualize your work into interactive storyboards and see your personas as individuals, not data.
Empathy in Designing Products
I once worked with a product team where we built a solution for elderly people. Our age demography was 50+ years and the oldest in our product team was 27 years old. How did we figure out what the elderly feel, when the oldest on our product team was only 27 years old? Big question.
The answer? We role-played.
We mimicked our grandma’s and grandpa’s in the house and did it work? Well coupled with the user interviews we conducted, it sure did!
We discovered that we needed to design screens with bigger elements and fewer texts. We needed to use a lot of visual cues too and visible buttons. Our design team understood that we should build a product that would improve the lives of our users while we solved their problem for them. Color contrast, font sizes, animations when actions loaded, and so much more, were factored into our design. The goal was simple; “If I were to be an elderly using this product, how would I like it to be?”.
Empathy In Managing Teammates & Product Stakeholders
Yes, you read that correctly. Empathy doesn’t just apply to people you build your product for, it also applies to people you build the product with.
When building products, as a product manager, it is your duty to manage your team while reporting to stakeholders. And working with a cross-functional team entails you understand each of them and their methods of handling tasks assigned to them.
When a teammate shares an idea, they may not convey the idea properly. This however does not nullify their intentions. Understanding what they don’t say and their intentions are what makes you a great team leader.
When reporting to stakeholders, you need to always show empathy in dealing with assignments and instructions. Imagine your business lead just asked that you factor in a few features into the company’s product this quarter. Immediately, you had a mental flash of your backlog and you are wondering, “how can I pull this off without putting undue pressure on my team?”. Sounds familiar right? 😂
As a PM, it is your responsibility to merge technology, user experience, and business, all in a seamless way. And to do this, you need to always think about the business goals just as you think about solving the problem for your users.
Understanding how to work with cross-functional teams and how to best convey product goals while incorporating business goals is really important to building a great product in your company.
Conclusion
As Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The key to building great products has always been to please and satisfy your users while solving their problems for them. The feelings they get when they use your product is always a key factor that determines how well they refer, pay, or keep using your product. As a PM or UX designer, practicing empathy goes beyond saying you do. You need to continuously aspire to understand and feel.
This is my first article and I do hope it was quite a read 😊. Feel free to share 📤 it with your product team.
