Empathy + Research
Empathy, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another.” Plainly, it’s imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Empathy research is the practice of prioritizing empathy in the beginning stages of design thinking, a way of thinking that centers the user. It’s engaging with and observing our audiences to understand the people we are designing for.
So, if we’re designing products or experiences for humans, combining empathy with our research is the first step. If we want to have a successful product, which is one that ultimately meets the needs and goals of the user, we have to start by understanding their feelings, motivations, needs, and perspectives.
Design Thinking Pioneer
Tim Brown, a pioneer of design thinking and former long-time CEO of IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy, had an early career that led him to question what design was actually accomplishing. This pivot came when the products he designed were becoming quickly obsolete.
He was inspired to make products better by centering the human experience. This pushed him to think beyond making existing products better and toward asking a different question. What if designers started with the human and their needs instead?
Why Empathy Matters
His question brings other designers and me back to what matters. I’ll be the first to admit, we can be very good at solving the wrong problems: making an interface cleaner, a product prettier, or a process more efficient without ever stopping to ask whether we’re addressing the problem that matters to the person experiencing it.
Empathy research gives us a chance to slow down and get to the root of users’ needs.
The Interaction Design Foundation describes a five-stage model: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. During the Empathize step, we learn what users need through research and by studying their experiences rather than relying on our own assumptions.
While dozens of methods for empathy research exist, these three approach the problem differently while helping us achieve the same thing: getting past our assumptions and into new insights.
1. What-How-Why
The What-How-Why method can be useful at the start of your research and can reveal or confirm assumptions along the way. This method invites us to look before we explain and can be useful when analyzing images taken while observing users.
The order is intentional: start with what you can directly observe, then consider how it happened. Then the how becomes more abstract, showing the physical way someone interacts, and only afterward ask why, so your conclusions are grounded in evidence rather than shaped by quick assumptions. This is where you become more interpretive, testing assumptions and forming new hypotheses.
For example, imagine you’re watching someone use an app. First, focus on what you can see: they’re scrolling slowly. Then look at how they’re scrolling. Do they pause for a while in certain places? Finally, ask why. Are they scrolling slowly and pausing because they’re confused or can’t find what they need?
It’s easy to watch someone do something and assume why they’re doing it. They ignore a button, and we decide they don’t understand the interface. Or maybe they’re just not interested in the button. With What-How-Why, we should take our interpretations a step further by examining what we observed and questioning our assumptions.
2. Extreme Users
If What-How-Why asks us to look more closely at ordinary behavior, extreme-user research asks us to look somewhere near the edges. Extreme Users are people whose needs or behaviors really stand out from the average. Put plainly, they are the ones on the far ends of the bell curve. They aren’t necessarily representative of everyone, and their value is that their experiences can make needs or problems more visible.
For example, if most people shop for groceries once a week, an extreme user might be someone who shops several times a day or someone who never shops in person at all. Designers pay special attention to these folks because their unique ways of doing things and creative workarounds can highlight problems and solutions that aren’t obvious when you only look at typical users. Often, what extreme users need can end up helping everyone.
IDEO describes this approach as seeking people who “live on the edge.” Its examples include shadowing bank tellers and exploring elder care through an immersive experience. They even organized an RV tour of California for clients and designers, giving them firsthand experience of California’s car culture. This gave them a chance to see and experience what their target users were going through, helping them build deeper empathy and come up with more relevant design ideas.
The goal is to deliberately move outside the average experience and see what becomes visible from there. That’s useful because when we design for the typical user, we can miss what the edges are telling us.
3. Analogous Experiences
If an RV tour isn’t feasible, there’s a method called Analogous Experiences, which essentially recreates the experience for the client through something comparable. Similar situations can be created, helping them draw parallels between their experience and the customer’s.
Analogous experiences foster new ways of seeing the familiar. For example, to help hospital staff empathize with patients, IDEO designed a restaurant-like scenario where clients experienced something similar to patients: confusing service, long waits, and lack of privacy. This hands-on experience helped staff understand how patients felt and measurably improve the discharge process.
This method is useful when you can’t observe users directly. It still builds emotional understanding, and it helps teams feel what users go through while deepening their understanding.
What These Methods Have in Common
Together, these methods share the same question Tim Brown put at the center of design thinking: what impact is this actually having on the person using it? They show what empathy looks like in practice: slowing down, questioning our assumptions, and learning from people’s real experiences.
We can’t know exactly what someone else thinks or feels. But we can observe more carefully and ask better questions instead. And that’s the real payoff. Not just building things more efficiently, but making sure we’re solving the right problem from the start. That’s often where better design begins.
AI tools supported proofreading and editing for this post.