Beyond empathy
Design is a lot about empathy. But is it enough? How about reason?
Backstory
I am a French service designer, working in Finland on a popular Finnish dating service. My team and I are developing a mobile app for our dating service while maintaining our old web app with a fragile legacy and building a new architecture. We are a tiny tech team: three developers and me, and a freelancer helping with UI design.
My situation has all types of constraints.
For one, this is my first assignment as a service designer (though I’ve been an industrial designer before) and I learn the job on the go; everything I do, I have to figure out on my own, without (yet) a more senior figure to give me feedback. If I, of course, appreciate my team’s and company’s trust, it is a daily challenge.
I’ve lived in Finland for a year, and I don’t speak Finnish (yet). It is a beautiful but challenging language with a completely different logic and way of thinking from all the others I’ve learned. And of course, our users are native Finnish speakers. When it comes to gathering insights, even if they speak English, even if tools and coworkers help me, the language barrier is real. There’s always a probability for misunderstandings when talking to our users.
Dating is also quite a delicate matter that may not be easy to talk about for everybody. Ok, it’s not as intimate as periods or impotence, but you see my point.
Add to this that Finns have a culture of quiet and don’t easily open up to complete strangers — of course, there are exceptions: I’m talking about a cultural trait here. Nevertheless, it doesn’t ease the process of gathering insights from users.
Lastly, in a dating service, you don’t want to please everybody. If most of our users are perfectly decent people, creeps are around, and you want as little of them as possible. You know, they’re the kind who talk inappropriately; who harass; who lie on the fact that they’re married; who stalk… I have to recognize them and understand them, to know how NOT to answer their needs. Or how to make them at least not-too-unhappy, while preventing them from freaking the others out.
So, what was I talking about? Oh, right. Empathy.
Let me draw the picture. I’m running a user test for the dating app on which we’re working. For this time, the users I meet are already using our web platform — since in the end, it will be the same service, we need please not only new users but also existing ones.
Now let’s imagine two extreme participant profiles:
- Sami (not really his name) speaks limited English with a heavy “rally” Finnish accent. He also has a stutter — unless he’s just anxious about this session. Though he seems to be a friendly, harmless person, though I try hard to make him feel comfortable, the meeting is painful for probably both of us. It makes it hard for me to engage with him and hard to empathize. My mistake: I recruited him. But the guy took his day to come and meet me, so we might as well get going.
- Anna (not really her name) speaks excellent English, is outgoing, and has a compelling way of talking. Her pitch and her body language make her emotions easy to read — like an open book. She’s talkative and doesn’t need to be pushed to express her feelings. Of course, it’s much easier to engage and empathize with her.
So, I see you coming: if I were good at it, I would be able to empathize even with people with whom it is harder to engage. Or I don’t have enough experience. Or I understand better the ones with whom I feel close (and that’s a real thing, it’s called intergroup empathy gap). Or I’m simply not able to empathize. Or other biases.
It may be — partly — true. For sure, I don’t yet have extensive experience and still find it hard to be aware of all my biases. For another project, I have been working with women teaching PE in Tanzania: no problem to empathize — and if we have some things in commong, I’m pretty sure we don’t belong to the same social group. I certainly can empathize, and still today, in my personal life, I sometimes would like to shut my empathetic feelings, because they f***ing hurt. And as Paul Bloom puts it:
“When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape.”
Not so useful when it comes to solving problems, don’t you think?
Nevertheless, on this day, with my lack of experience and my overpouring empathy, I cannot deny that I “hear” some users’ voices louder than others.
If I listen to my gut feeling, Anna’s insights are much more “interesting” and “valuable”, just because she had a stronger personality with which it was easy to engage. Whatever the bias is, I empathize more with her. As a result, I feel much more like I want to solve her individual needs.
But if I listen to my brain, both users have as valuable insights, and I need to rationalize, balance them accordingly.
It relates to Daniel Kahneman’s system 1 — the instant guts, emotions, feelings — and system 2 — the slow, rational backup. If you haven’t heard about it, Julia Collado clearly explains and illustrate the concept.
I see empathy as belonging to system 1: while in a session, you need to empathize with your interlocutor in order to integrate their feelings and understand them. You are having a live conversation where you need fast reactions and improvisation. But afterwards, I would encourage relying on reason and system 2 when it comes to analyzing and making sense of all insights coming from different people.
As an example, one sensitive topic for us is the profile picture. At the moment, we don’t force people to upload a picture. More than half of the profiles in our dating service don’t have pictures — yes, I know. Wut? If they often have their reasons for not uploading a picture, in a general manner… it doesn’t make the others very happy.
Along with most people I met, Sami wishes that fewer profiles were faceless; some even say pictures should be mandatory. Anna doesn’t want to show herself, and if possible, would rather not see others’. She wants to have blind dates, unburdened by prejudice. Since I started with this project, she’s the only one to have ever said that, face-to-face and online research combined.
And honestly, while I walked out of most of the sessions thinking: should we make pictures mandatory? or: how do we encourage users to upload a picture?, I walked out of hers thinking: let’s make an online blind dating service! (note the “?” vs “!”)
Of course, we could choose to make this our “thing”:
- I’m working on an online dating service.
- Oh nice, so what’s your thing?
- Blind dating.
But then I reflect and, wait a minute, I don’t have anything more than a few words from one person to support this, against a vast majority who thinks otherwise. We can not afford to deceive our majority based on one single person’s point of view. And even if we could probably come up with some feature that lets users be blind if they want, this person’s insight is not enough to support such a business case.
“It’s possible that […] you can understand that someone is in pain without actually feeling it.” (Paul Bloom)
So in the end, even if empathy is, in my opinion, a great help in understanding users, I would probably choose to take my decisions based on some extent of reasoning on top of my gut feeling. Reason may also be a way to override all our natural, human biases that empathy contributes to creating.
How about you?
They say empathy is a muscle that needs to be trained, just like any other. But is that the only skill to help me prioritize user needs and take the right decisions? How about reason? How do you equalize the voice of your users?
I’d like to hear/read what’s your take about this. Please comment below!
Further readings:
- “Against Empathy — The case for rational compassion” by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. I read this book a while before the experience I describe above, but it seems relevant to the topic: according to him, empathy is not a bad thing, it’s just not the ultimate answer to everything, among others because it’s “innumerate and biased”.
- “Thinking, fast and slow” by the psychologist and economics Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman if you are interested in reading more about “system 1” and “system 2”.
