Empathy Endurance in Design
At its core, user experience research, design and writing is really user-centered UI design. It comes down to making sure that we’re able to connect and empathize with our users. It’s not just asking surface level questions to understand what features we can build. It’s understanding on a much deeper level the broader context of users and their environments.
How can we build for people? How can we empathize with them? Empathy is something that’s really hard to accomplish. It’s something that a lot of UX and UI professionals like to tout, like to speak about, but it’s something that requires a lot of practice.
Empathy endurance is a really important thing that anyone in UX design should strive to build into their career. It’s more the idea that we can connect with users by going to their environments and meeting them where they are. It’s still really important that after we connect with those users and have those conversations, we have the empathy endurance.
A key piece of online UX design education is learning the ability to bring those conversations and connections back to the product that we’re building. Users need their voices heard by being directly reflected into the products. At its core, it’s empathy. It’s user-centered design, and it’s people. That’s the really beautiful part about UX, whether it’s quantitative research or qualitative research. At its core it’s about people. That’s what makes it so exciting to be part of the UX design process.
