Poor design empathy and the philosophies around it.
Understanding the core requirement of “Socially Shared Empathy” within Accessibility Designers.
So, what is Empathy?
Emotion researchers define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions and imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. Designers are often expected to exhibit a high level of “cognitive empathy,” also known as “perspective taking.” Cognitive empathy is the ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions. There are several tools used by designers to develop cognitive empathy such as user journeys, and empathy mapping. However, the current practice of empathy in design thinking often lacks an inclusive mindset.
Empathy is more than a reaction to specific identities. People define themselves in various ways, which can change over time. Many factors, like culture, personal experiences, and social interactions influence identity. When designing inclusively and with empathy, it’s important to consider these different perspectives. This approach helps create products and experiences that meet the needs of a diverse range of people.
Elise Roy, a former human rights lawyer and currently an inclusive design strategist quotes Warren Berger in one of her TED Talks —
“Design thinking teaches us to look sideways, to reframe, to refine, to experiment, and, probably most importantly, to ask those stupid questions”
Empathetic design research methods, which focus on understanding and addressing users’ needs and experiences, have faced critique from the disability community. This critique highlights the need for a more inclusive approach to design research. The lack of inclusivity awareness in the design community can result in incomplete experiences that may unintentionally create barriers for individuals, regardless of whether they have disabilities. For example, designers who use disability simulation techniques such as blindfolds to empathize with blind users may not need to consider the user with disabilities; instead, they may focus on their own experience wearing a blindfold.
So why are we lacking Empathy?
Designers may lack empathy towards individuals with disabilities for several reasons. The primary reason is often their focus on the practical and achievable aspects of a task. Additionally, traditional empathy-building methodologies may be used as a way for designers to convince themselves they have superior training and ethical tools. These methods are used to quickly assess and innovate problems within unfamiliar domains.
A designer can truly connect with a project and its audience by approaching the work with genuine intent. This involves understanding the issues from multiple perspectives. However, designers may unknowingly introduce biases into their work due to prevailing attitudes or behaviors. Below are a few mindsets to consider:
- Design Savior Complex: Designers, despite good intentions, may impose solutions based on limited user understanding, unintentionally sidelining them from the design process.
- “Normality” notion-driven Empathy: Designers outside the disability community often distinguish between “standard” and “disabled” users, focusing on individual limitations rather than product or service issues.
- Monotonous Perspective: Designers create personas to categorize end-users, but this can limit perspectives as it’s based on specific characteristics. This approach is used until the final design is reached.
- “Additional” Accommodation Effort: Designers often overlook the needs of impaired individuals, assuming they require “extra” services. They believe mainstream services need “additional” features for inclusivity, but these are seldom implemented due to the added effort.
- Designing for Average Joe: Designers in consulting agencies and enterprise-driven solutions often focus on mainstream experiences for average users. However, this approach can lead to unsustainable solutions due to its limited scope.
- Intergroup Empathy Bias: Many designers fail the empathy test due to intergroup empathy bias, which suggests people empathize more with those similar to themselves. This poses a major challenge in modern design practices.
Jamil Zaki, a research psychologist, shares in his TED Talk how empathy has diminished over the years due to increased differentiation of individuals based on their physical abilities and productive capacities. He underlines that true empathy benefits people in numerous ways compared to their less empathic peers.
Empathy Mapping Tool — A classic empathy failure!
The ‘user-centric’ ideology of Design thinking has been quite compromised with the use of traditional empathy maps that primarily seem to focus on the experiences of able-bodied individuals projected by what they — See, Hear, Say, Do, and Think. Here is a comparative study, explaining why the traditional empathy maps do not go well with the universal design principles.
The current empathy approach, laden with bias and exclusion, needs a radical change to prevent designers from genuinely connecting with the real-world experiences of all users, regardless of their abilities.
Traditional empathy maps, often used to capture user thoughts and feelings, may not adequately represent the varied perspectives of individuals with disabilities, including those with physical, sensory, cognitive, or invisible disabilities. Additionally, they do not capture the emotional dimensions of living with a disability, such as empowerment and societal attitudes impact, which is crucial for understanding user needs. To address this gap, designers should consider adapting empathy maps to be more inclusive and reflective of the experiences of individuals with disabilities.
EmpathyAut — An improvised Empathy Mapping Tool for Individuals with Cognitive Impairment
EmapthyAut, a pioneering company, has revolutionized the interface design space by enhancing empathy between designers and autistic users. They introduced an innovative Empathy Mapping model that adeptly modifies traditional sections like “Listen”, “Think and Feel”, “See”, and “Say” to overcome the challenges in verbal communication faced by autistic users.
By genuinely considering cognitive impairment, their framework was shaped by areas like communication, behavior, and cognition. This not only proved essential for individuals with cognitive impairment but also helpful in capturing the essence of everyday life for the mainstream population in the real world. Consequently, it led to a user-friendly experience that accommodates the unique needs and challenges faced by individuals with autism.
“Empathy allows us to talk about what it is to be (like) the other, but does not raise the question ‘what it is to be ‘with’ the other.” — quoted from The Map is not the Territory: Empathy in design, authored by David Siegel and Susan Dray
How might we introduce inclusive empathy among designers? — Recalibrating to different realities.
Empathy involves both the capacity to share and understand others’ experiences. Recent studies suggest that although empathy is partly inherited, it is not solely determined by genetics. For centuries, philosophers proposed that empathy is innate, and may or may not be present in an individual. Currently, scientists argue that it can be developed as a skill, and enhanced through various methods like observation, interviews, and creative empathy techniques.
One should not worry about the range of empathy while developing dynamic perspectives, which might seem like a crazy range of “Deanna Troi”, catching other people’s feelings (high empathy) and reading their minds to “Android Data” with no feelings at all (no or low empathy). This was stated as the Roddenberry Hypothesis. — quoted from Jamil Zaki’s TED Talk “We’re experiencing an empathy shortage, but we can fix it together”
“…and eventually it got easier, I learned to tune myself to their different emotional frequencies and that allowed me to maintain a strong bond with each of them, even if their connection to each other disintegrated…”
