THINK WITH ALEC

Sympathy acknowledges that users are having difficulties, but empathy goes further by understanding the users’ needs and motivations.

Are you unknowingly practicing sympathy instead of empathy?

In an effort to practice empathy many teams mistakenly practice sympathy. Although these words have different meanings teams, often incorrectly use sympathy and empathy interchangeably. This confusion results in a large gap in their understanding and in an inability to address real human needs.

Sympathy

Sympathy is the acknowledgment of the suffering of others. Sympathy is often the reaction in the form of sorrow or pity to the hardship or plate of another person.

In UX sympathy is limited to acknowledging that users are going through something difficult, say a scenario task or journey.  For example, when we’re designing an accessible website for people who are Blind we may express sympathy by acknowledging their potential challenges.

It will be hard to consume content if you can’t see infographics, or this font is small and light and may be hard for someone older to read.

Empathy

Empathy on the other hand is the ability to fully understand and mirror and then share another person’s expression, needs and motivations.

In UX empathy enables us to understand not only our user’s immediate frustrations but also their hopes, fears, abilities, limitations, reasonings and goals.

Instead of just designing an accessible website, practicing empathy is using a screen reader blindfolded, in order to complete a task on your own website.

You might say I’m struggling to find my way around or this is much tougher than I thought it would be. what makes the distinction between these two things hard is there’s no firm threshold, rather the relationship between the two is best represented on a spectrum with pity the most disconnected and abstract version of sympathy, on one end and compassion the more connected embodied version of empathy on the other.

Pity & Compassion

Pity is simply when you feel sorry for someone else. On the other hand in the spectrum is compassion. Compassion is the call-to-action derived from empathy when our understanding of another thoughts feelings give us some kind of compulsion duty or desire to help change that person’s situation for the better.

So to conclude, ensure you and your team are practicing empathy by using qualitative research methods, recruiting diverse users, using videos anytime you present your research and investing in a diverse design team.

Empathy in UX is essential, it’s our bridge into users’ minds and our greatest asset as UX professionals. Empathy allows us to design with intent, introduce focus and clarity, advocate on behalf of our users and challenge our assumptions.

Source: NNgroup – Nielsen Norman Group