More on Digital Empathy & Empathic Design

In another Grade Boost assignment, I wrote about a talk that I attended on how using empathy as a tool in understanding history is extremely useful to researchers exploring history. By using our innately human sense of empathy, we can better understand those who came before us and know their motivations for certain actions. I connected this use of empathy to digital empathy, when the skills of using empathy are applied in digital situations. This is also extremely similar to empathic design, the process in which the actual tools are being designed while keeping the experience of the user in mind. Empathic design is listening to what the users want in a product, and even imagining what the user would want in a digital tool. The skill of empathy is therefore necessary in empathic design, because designers and programmers need to observe and understand the feelings of another when creating tools. Researchers will often ask consumers questions about a hypothetical product they are designing, what their needs are, and if they would use it. But, sometimes consumers don’t even know what they want or need. This is when digital empathy and empathic design come into play.

Before creating our Collaborative Digital Project, the class went out onto the Holy Cross campus and asked students questions about their experiences using technology. These questions were tailored to what our specific pages were going to be on. My group asked people if they knew how algorithms worked, which search algorithms they preferred and why, if they knew what to do when their laptops broke, and if they knew how to fully take advantage of the services HC provides when it comes to search algorithms and IT help. For the most part, students knew how to use CrossSearch, but they weren’t aware of the other services HC provides, like the CrossWorks pages that has a plethora of research tools and aides. Students also didn’t know the extent to which the MRC could help them with any tech problems they have — like myself, they mostly thought of the MRC lab as a place to print things.

Using this knowledge, my team started on our process of Empathic Design, using empathy to create our pages. We highlighted things that the students didn’t know about to bring these helpful resources to their attention. We have formatted our websites with questions, like “What do I do if my laptop breaks?” to imagine what a student’s thought process would be like in that situation, and then put the relevant links/information below that question to make for a simple design and follow the user’s train of thought. In this way, digital empathy and empathic design served us well because my team was able to create a better website through the process of putting the user’s needs first. Users will also only want to access and go back to sites that are easy for them to use and serve their needs, so using empathy during the design process is beneficial for all parties involved.