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ON THE EDGE
SCALING AND SUSTAINING A HUMAN-CENTERED APPROACH
IN THE EVOLVING PRACTICE OF DESIGN
By Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard, IDEO
In this essay, well explore how design empathy works, its value
to businesses, and some ways in which it can be used to effect
positive change. Well discuss the need for scaling and sustaining
design empathy, so that its benefits can reach more people and
have long-term positive impact throughout organizations. And
well offer stories from the edges of our own empathic design
practice. Our goal is to inspire other designers and innovators
to share their practices and to expand the conversation about
empathy to include the business community-at-large.
drawn toward solving legal hurdles, reacting to Sometimes its worth going the extra mile to
competitive pressure, and overcoming technological develop emotional resonance with people were
obstacles the stress of running a business can designing for. We have had teams do things like:
easily suppress a desire for design empathy.
As IDEOs David and Tom Kelley describe, many Shadow sales representatives and bank tellers on
fears keep people from trying to go out and the job to understand their needs and challenges
solve real problems (Kelley, 2012). Empathy is a Sleep on rubber sheets overnight at an elder-care
counterforce to those fears: regaining perspective facility to relate to spending ones last months or
on what customers want and really care about years there
can fundamentally change a business by presen- Participate in grueling endurance events to share
ting new opportunities and giving it a means to athletes exhilaration and pain
address them. Take an RV road trip through California to
experience car culture
Its possible to fuel empathy, or pivotal out of ego
experiences, without a lot of effort. For example, Seek Those Who Live on the Edge
imagine being asked to come up with a long-term In our fieldwork we look for diverse people and
vision for a brand of toys. Perhaps youve conduct- situations to promote empathy, which we internally
ed lots of market research, but the analyses do not refer to as extremes. These mostly ordinary
point you in any clear direction, nor connect you people with extreme points of viewowing to their
to the mindset of children. To kindle that sense of personality, circumstances, or cultureprovide a
excitement and inspiration, you might simply get broad range of experiences and well-developed
on the floor for a play-along with youngsters in the perspectives that would be harder to identify if
target age range, or arrange a toy-hacking party at we looked at a random sample of individuals repre-
a local school. senting a range of the target demographics.
Figure 2. A designer gets his chest waxed to empathize with wound-care patients. Photo courtesy of IDEO.
Here well look at both edgesscaling and sustain- in the United States had to be replaced with activi-
ingby offering examples of how weve addressed ties that made sense for consumers in Ghana (Sklar
each one in recent design challenges. Although & Madsen, 2010). The designers set up a stall to
admittedly imperfect, our experiments are intended sell items at a community market, engaging rural
to inspire others to create better ways of fostering villagers who came into town to shop and learning
design empathy broadly among individuals, teams, directly how they made their purchase decisions
and organizations. in the moment.
Analogous Experiences
When it isnt feasible to bring clients face-to-face
with users in context, we can create analogous
experiences to foster empathy. Analogous experi-
ences help organizations see familiar ways of
working with fresh eyes. IDEO sometimes puts
clients through carefully crafted feels like
situations to help them draw parallels between
their own experiences and those of their customers.
Designing analogous experiences often gives us
more latitude and makes it easier to involve larger
groups in the design empathy process, without
sacrificing any of the emotional impact more
traditional observations would provide. In fact,
because they tend to require some effort on the
clients part to engage, analogous experiences
can have even more transformative power than
the passive observation of users actual activities.
Unexplained dishes came and went. There was a lot Each participant took home four prototypes with
of waiting with no explanation. instructions, as well as the profile of a patient
whose role he or she had to assume during the
The extreme nature of this analogous scenario was experiment. All participants had to store their
riskynot all participants appreciated the experi- prototypes in their refrigerator, give themselves
ence at first. But a debriefing conversation followed mock injections once a week, and document their
and later the experiment proved remarkably experiences. Every week, they were presented
successful: The hospital workers who took part with challenges of the everyday mishap variety
now actively seek ways to measurably improve the spilled juice, last-minute trip via airplane, and so
patient experience. Their first success was to speed forthfor which they had to find a way to cope.
up the process of discharging patients to the point
where nearly 50 percent were able to leave before At the end of the month, the clients were surprised
noon, exceeding the hospitals goal of 30 percent. by how much theyd learned from the exercise.
This yielded ideas for improving dozens of aspects
Long-Term Immersion of the patient experience, from product packaging
For another project, we needed to ensure that a and instructions to customer support. Convincing
pharmaceutical company was truly empathetic to such a large group to go through such an inconve-
the cumulative effect of small inconveniences of nience is not always easy, but the experience gave
its injectable therapy. Its easy to overlook little the organization a sense of empathy that motivated
problems in the development context, when everyone to work on smaller issues as well.
larger problems seem far more critical. To provide
a counterbalance, our designers planned a month- As demonstrated by the three cases above, we
long immersive experience for 35 members of often face situations in which we need to help large
the clients organization to understand the pain groups of clients forge emotional connections
points of a weekly injectable drug. with others in challenging contexts. We are more
Figure 7. Customer stories, viewed as documentaries on an iPad, bring them alive in a workshop. Photo courtesy of IDEO.
a small sample could be shrugged off as an anoma- stories and experiences, and the quantitative
ly or a quirk, or conversely, could capture a teams research considers the market context and poten-
imagination and be given too much weight. tial impact. We then embed stories into data and
cross-validate emotional insights with numbers to
For example, a young woman who kept track of arrive at a stronger, human-centered point of view
her multiple responsibilities by using a collection (Seemann, 2012).
of different smart devices initially appeared to be
unique; however, the quantitative side of the study Taking Clients on Visceral Journeys
showed that she exemplified an entire segment Businesses that do not start off by having such an
of early adopters whose mental model for virtual empathic environment can find simpler ways to
workspace was markedly different from that of a begin to foster empathy. For example, a European
more experienced male geek user group. telecom asked us to help it develop a customer-
centered strategy for its tariffs. As designers
This hybrid approach merges the best aspects started to explore the customer experience, they
of qualitative and quantitative research: The quickly found themselves buried in information.
qualitative research uncovers the real human They struggled to resolve the disconnect between
Dandavate, Uday, Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders, and S. Sklar, Aaron, and Sally Madsen. 2010. Design for
Stuart. 1996. Emotions Matter: User Empathy in the Social Impact. Ergonomics in Design (Spring): 4-5,
Product Development Process. In Proceedings of 31.
the Human Factors and Ergonomics Societys 40th
Annual Meeting: 415-418. State Farm Next Doors official Web site,
www.nextdoorchi.com (accessed September 12,
Decety, Jean, and William Ickes, eds. 2011. The 2012).
Social Neuroscience of Empathy. MIT Press.
Zak, Paul. 2012. The Moral Molecule. The Source of
Kelley, David and Tom. 2012. Reclaim your creative Love and Prosperity. Dutton.
confidence: How to get over your fears that
block your best ideas. Harvard Business Review, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
December 2012. Thanks to our colleagues for doing daringly
empathic work and for sharing their stories and
Jack, Anthony, Abigail Dawson, Katelyn Begany, photographs for this chapter. Thanks to everyone
Regina L. Leckie, Kevin Barry, Angela Ciccia, who read and commented and improved our drafts.
Abraham Snyder. 2012. fMRI Reveals Reciprocal And, finally, thanks to our clients for bringing us
Inhibition Between Social and Physical Cognitive wickedly complex design challenges, giving us
Domains. Neuroimage, Vol. 66, February 2013: permission to experiment, and letting us write
385-401. Elsevier. about our experiences.
Kiviat, Barbara. 2010. Danones Cheap Trick. Time Author contact info:
magazine, August 23, 2010. www.time.com/time/
magazine/article/0,9171,2010077,00.html [accessed Katja Battarbee
September 12, 2012]. Kbattarbee@ideo.com