How to employ Empathy in creating user-centric products.

Empathy is the bedrock of any user-centric product

In his article on Empathy and Products., Derek Vinebo said “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.”

There can’t be anything such as a user-centric product if empathy is missing. Empathy is standing in the place of the user and feeling what they feel so you can process the emotion to create a product that meets their demands.

When it comes to creating great user experiences, empathy allows us to understand not only our users' anxieties, but also their pain, aspirations, doubts, constraints, and priorities, allowing us to design solutions that not only solve their problem, but also improve their lives by eliminating excess friction.

To rid yourself of assumptions you have made for users and transition to employing empathy to create products that are centered on the user, here are some tips to follow

Confirm your ideas with your users:

You should be able to always confirm your design ideas with your users and clients before working on the project, asking for their opinion on your ideas will let you what informs their decisions, you can even request for a background story to the product they want to build.

Learn and Observe your User:

Sometimes your clients can tell you an incomplete story when defining their problems, most times, they do so because they don't understand what they want. It is up to the designer to figure out what the true issues are and produce a solution. By monitoring the users, the designers can fill in the gaps in the product. Designers can understand what they like, what motivates them to use that application, what their pain points are, and what their frustrations are by using empathy.

Look for the Insights of your user:

Now, ask questions from the client from different angles, these questions are to provoke the thoughts of the User or make them simplify their explanations such that you can tap into their insights, those insights in raw form, but you give life to it for them, since you have been able to identify with their problems and expectations.

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