What is Empathy? Empathy is a pretty strong word, and I think that we all know what empathy means. It’s the ability to understand and share the feeling of another person.

Sarah Gibbons wrote an article in 2018 describing the spectrum of empathy and how this applies to building a product; in this spectrum, you can see how empathy changes depending on the effort and the level of understanding of other’s people problems.

Now, why is it important to have empathy for your personas? Because it allows you to build a product that fully understands users perspectives, needs, fears, and motivation.

And now, I’m going to mention an example that happens in one of our projects:

“We were building a software product that would allow Nurses to order items that patients needed and didn’t have in storage. So we created this software product to be used on desktops. When we started to be empathetic towards our personas, we realized that, in reality, these nurses wouldn’t have the time to go to their desktops and submit the orders. What solved their problems was providing a mobile app with the same functionality so they could easily submit what items they needed while walking in the hospital’s halls, going from one patient to another. This change also was represented in other functionalities like not disconnecting the nurses from the mobile app after long periods of inactivity, etc.”

You may now see the differences between having sympathy, meaning having the knowledge that your end user is having a problem and trying to solve it, and empathy, putting yourself in your end-user shoes and understanding them.

Suppose you’re having problems empathizing with your personas; in that case, you should try to build an empathy map for each persona. That way, you’ll understand what your persona is thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing, and doing. It would take you a step closer to fully empathizing with them.

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