Empathic design

Empathic design is commonly existing as a user-centered design advance that puts special emphasis on inspection of the emotional aspects of user-product relationships (McDonagh and Lebbon, 2000; Fulton-Suri, 2003; Crossley 2003). The empathic design process is sometimes mistakenly referred to as Empathetic design.

The seminal publication on empathic design is “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design” by Leonard and Rayport. The foundation of empathic design is observation, and the goal is to identify latent customer needs. Latent needs are product requirements that customers don’t even know they desire, or in some cases are solutions that customers have difficulty envisioning due to lack of exposure to new technologies or being locked in the mindset of working with existing products and services. In the empathic design process, researchers observe people in their normal home or work environment in order to see how they use and interact with the products under study.

Empathic design relies heavily on observation of consumers as opposed to traditional market research which relies more on consumer inquiry. By avoiding user-created inquiry mechanisms, empathic design avoids possible biases in surveys and questions, and minimizes the chance that consumers will provide false information (as some customers are reluctant to criticize and complain about product features directly). Traditional inquiry based market research often fails to capture latent customer needs that can be identified by observation.

Often the customer observation is performed by a small team of specialists, such as an engineer, a human-factors expert, and a designer. The specialists each observe from a different perspective and then document their observations (sometimes via photograph and video tape) to capture subtle interactions such as body language and facial expressions, and also to allow exposure of the observational data to a larger group. The design group then meets after performing the observations to evaluate and interpret their observations and identify latent needs, desirable product attributes and also weed out any undesirable features.