Humanity has an empathy problem
User Experience is paying the price.
Several articles with provocative titles starting with “User Experience is Dead…” started appearing in my feeds. I’ve read about a dozen of these and will summarize them for you at the end, BUT there’s something deeper going on.
Empathy, which is foundational to user experience design, is in jeopardy.
Why? Three reasons.
Empathy is Hard
Let me tell you a story. While I was at Frog Design, Roche asked us to design a product to help people with Type 2 Diabetes. As part of our User Research, we did a series of in-home visits and interviews with people who had Type 2 Diabetes. After several visits, we noted that the disease wasn’t just a problem for the person who had it; it was often a problem for the whole family. The person’s spouse and children had to provide support, help the person eat right, and ideally engage in that person’s exercise program. All difficult challenges. The problem became broader, including changing habits and behaviors, not just measuring a diabetic’s blood glucose level.
And then our perspective changed.
We arrived at one house, and the smell hit us as soon as the door opened. It was a fetid, stale smell with a kind of acidic quality. When we stepped inside, the smell likely came from the feces-encrusted birdcage in the living room. The home was filthy. We could see into the kitchen from where we stood, and it was jam-packed with dirty dishes piled high and HUGE bags of junk food on the floor. From the ceiling hung flypaper covered in dead flies. The homeowner offered me a seat, but I declined. It wasn’t a hoarder home, but it was close, and it was clear from our interview with the family that the problems they were having ran much deeper than the father’s Type 2 Diabetes.
We could empathize with many of the people we’d already met. We’ve all wanted to stop eating so many cookies or get to the gym on a more regular basis, but this last family was likely suffering from depression and was much deeper in a hole than most of the people we’d interviewed. I was torn between wanting to continue doing my job, stopping to help clean up, and just leaving to get away from the smell. I felt sympathy for them but not empathy because they were so far removed from my own experience. My friend Emily Privot McNamara pointed out that there’s a tension between empathy and judgment.
Was I judging them? Probably yes, and this is part of why empathy is so hard. In the paper, ‘Empathy is Hard Work,’ the authors argue that there is an “expected value of mental costs (e.g., effort, negative affect, feelings of inefficacy)” and that people don’t engage in empathy without weighing these costs. Further, they say, “Empathy can involve uncertainty,
and attempting to share in others’ experiences may feel demanding because of less familiarity and external information to rely upon.”
Empathy exists on a spectrum. The closer you are to the situation, the greater empathy you can feel, and of course the farther away from the experience, the less empathy you feel. If someone you know experiences a loss, you feel terrible for them. If someone posts about a loss they have, you might feel compassion. My sister and I lost my mother last year. We have a great deal of empathy for each other.
For the project, we completed the research, synthesized the results, and packaged up our methodology and insights into a well-designed presentation. When we presented the report the client nodded and agreed, and we moved on to the next part of our project. But it nagged at me. Our client didn’t meet the people we met, and they heard their stories filtered through our perspective…however well-intentioned. They certainly didn’t have any idea how it smelled walking into that one house — it wasn’t in the presentation and couldn’t be “seen” in the video clip.
From that moment on, I started saying:
There’s no such thing as secondhand empathy.
How were our clients expected to feel strongly enough to make good decisions about the solutions we proposed? The disconnect between the C-Suite and the organizations’ users and customers is huge. In a Business Insider piece, Mark Cohen the director of retail studies at Columbia University and the former CEO of Sears Canada:
“Many people (execs and managers) that I’ve observed either don’t have that view, or aren’t willing to do that, or they pay lip service to it. — They visit a few stores, they talk to some people, but they don’t really get in touch with what is actually going on.”
He’s right; this is no way to gain empathy. No wonder something stupid like a Net Promoter Score (NPS) takes such hold. It’s a shortcut. It is easily asked at the end of the sales funnel and is a convenient question to answer — especially when the product or experience is top of mind. NPS is easily represented on a single page in a PowerPoint deck, and it’s easy to understand. High is good, low is bad. “What was it like last month? Oh, it’s up? Fantastic, let’s shoot for higher numbers next quarter, shall we?”
NPS requires no empathy
As a binary simulacrum for the messy reality of real people’s lives, it’s perfect for those who think there are more important things to do than understand their customers. I’m picking on NPS, but any stand-in metric for the real work of uncovering unmet needs and addressing customer concerns would do in this argument.
Although empathy is critical to the design process, it’s hard to do, super hard to communicate, and, if removed from the equation, leads to shittier products and services.
Life in a Bubble
Social Media refocused our attention from real-life interactions to our screens, first on the desktop, then more ubiquitously on our smartphones. It connected us to like-minded people, and we formed groups and followed people. We communicated with our friends and liked their pets, kids, or vacation photos. Over time, however, our groups began to keep us from seeing and communicating with…well…others. We bubbled up in our cozy little corners of the internet with the people we knew and were like us and we, for the most part, ignored those not in our circles.
When these tools began to foment outrage to increase engagement, things got a little worse. Sabrina (not her name) poked her head up in my social media feed and suggested that when Trump won the first time, it was a good thing because Obama had been a terrible president and that we should all just settle down to eight years of him. I had gone to high school with Sabrina. She always struck me as sweet, and when she reconnected with me on FB, I was happy to be friends with her. She didn’t post much, liked the occasional baby photo I posted, and things went on as usual. I can’t remember what I said to get her to chime in that day, but I’m sure it was something negative about Trump. Some of my friends jumped all over her, and others simply sought to engage her, asking her questions she wasn’t prepared to answer. It got heated and she unfriended me. This interaction was at the small end of the spectrum. To say that it was much worse for Myanmar in 2017, as part of the Rohingya massacre, is an understatement.
It was differently awful on Twitter, where anyone could follow anyone. Heated arguments led to doxxing and outright abuse. And our (then and now again) president wasn’t helping by “governing by tweet” and outright lying.
Then COVID hit, and we disappeared into our homes for two years. Gaining empathy is challenging in the best of circumstances, but virtual empathy is worse.
Weaponized Empathy
I heard a clip the other day of Elon Musk talking to Joe Rogan.
“There’s a guy who posts on X who’s great and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Mm. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. It’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.”
Weaponized empathy? Civilizational Suicide? The empathy response is a bug in Western Civilization? Turns out the Musk is quoting Gad Saad. The basic argument Saad has is that when people are too empathetic and sacrifice security for the sake of compassion, it is bad. His example is bringing home an unhoused person because you feel bad for them — you’re putting your family at risk. (Note that this hypothetical runs against most people’s empathy response according to the paper I cited a moment ago.) When this is writ large by “opening our (US) borders” to people looking to immigrate, we’re sacrificing our country to care for those less fortunate than us. Facts aside, the arguments are made with intelligent-sounding language from a professor who has written several books. Then, the snippets are repeated on a widely heard podcast between a celebrity podcaster with a substantial following and the richest grifter in the world.
The average listener walks away with a soundbite or two and the general idea that empathy is bad.
Musk has stated that most people are like NPCs — Non-Player Characters in video games. We are? Well, that suggests a lack of empathy, doesn’t it? He and Trump have expressed zero empathy in terms of Musk’s task of government efficiency. When an email shows up asking you to justify your job or be fired or that you needn’t come to the office tomorrow because you are indeed fired, this demonstrates a disregard for humanity.
Although there is zero transparency in these activities, part of the “criteria” for what gets cut and how they’re operating is an anti-DEI rampage. DEI is defined as anything using these words published in the NY Times. Many of these words reside alongside empathy.
So, not only is empathy hard to achieve and difficult to communicate to a third party, but technology has also been slowly separating humanity into subgroups, making it harder even to begin to empathize. Our new regime here in the US doesn’t seem to care too much about most people.
This is all a backdrop within which Designers, whose job is to try to empathize and advocate for the end user, are trying to operate.
No wonder…
With that context in place, here’s a synopsis of the articles I mentioned.
UX is Evolving
User Experience is indeed evolving so as practitioners we need to evolve as well. One of the articles suggests working past individual products and towards greater systems and experiences. Some suggest that we need to gather more skills and pick up research, strategy, product growth, and visual design. One suggests stepping back from generalization toward specialization. I agree that if the times are changing, you should change with them. Also, learn everything you can about AI. You ignore it at your expense.
UX Should Learn the Business
In Meghan Logan’s excellent article, ‘UX design isn’t dead, you’re just confused,’ she points out that: “Business leaders are confused about design; design is confused about business.” Designers should work harder to learn the business they’re working for and develop a kind of general business acumen. Designers are asked to provide success metrics and justify positive business impact; unlike other roles in the organization. Patrick Neeman writes, “We have to embrace our contribution to the business more and learn more about the problems we’re solving.” Yet another article points out we “should adopt skills like operational efficiency, decision-making dynamics, and influence.”
Yes. Many people have been saying this for years. But perhaps the driving force behind the required justification is that design work leverages empathy and good taste (which can’t be explained.)
In 1986, when Steve Jobs hired Paul Rand to create the visual identity for his company NeXT, Jobs asked Rand for more options. Rand famously responded with a bold stance: “I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution,” effectively rejecting the idea of multiple options and focusing on a single, confident solution. Rand had the cache to use this approach and intimated that his good taste, developed from years of this work, required that Jobs trust that he’d provided a good solution.
The Business Should Learn UX
One points out that businesses have discovered that merely buying expensive design leaders, consultancies, and teams of designers does not make them Apple. I’m quite familiar with this from the five years I spent at McKinsey. Again, Meghan’s article, points out that businesses undervalue design because they don’t understand it. Design understanding has grown throughout my career, but we’re not there yet. Because companies have been exposed to design and have seen the success of good design, a lot more folks get it, but we still have more work to do.
We will continue to educate our business colleagues, but for fuck sake, meet us halfway and try trusting us! We may not be Paul Rand, but we do have a wealth of experience.
UX Can’t Make Excuses
Scott Berkun points out that designers shouldn’t complain or blame externalities — my previous statement aside. :) He says, they must accept the tradeoffs in design, take proactive steps to gain power, and learn that corporate response to tech and economic downturns may mean layoffs. If you are currently out of work, I can help you, please reach out on LinkedIn, but also be prepared next time. Keep your network, portfolio, and resume up to date. And persevere. We have to have hope that we can get past this time and achieve a greater future despite the massive personal hurdles and the existential crises we’re all going through. Maybe start your own company? Owning means a much greater responsibility, but it also means power.
And please. Double down on empathy. It is a lifeline through all this.
