Empathy in Design Driven by Research
Our next module in online UX design education is project planning. Project planning is essential to a successful user research stage in the UX design or UI design process. In this module, we will explore how important it is to understand context. Political, social, cultural, and economic factors really have a huge weight in the way that you’re planning your use of research. You will understand how to identify the best format and how to conduct these surveys, interviews or focus groups following ethical guidelines.
Once we have concluded the user research stage, we will have gathered data. This data will be filtered in a way that will allow us to create specific psychographics and demographics, which we call personas. The reason why we call them personas, even though these are fictitious human beings, is that they are based on real data that we obtained through our user research stage.
Calling them personas is to humanize them. By humanizing them, it allows the designer of UX or UI, you in this case, to develop a higher level of empathy with this persona, this fictitious human being character. You will be able to put yourself in their shoes in a much easier manner and be more empathetic and understanding of their needs and how to connect with them. Connection: it’s very important in this process.
