Design Thinking: Empathy and Bias
Introduction to Design Thinking: Empathy and Bias
Design Thinking is a creative process used to develop solutions to challenges. It is deeply rooted in empathy and thrives on continuous feedback, reflection, and iteration. It revolves around an interest in developing an understanding of the people who use products and services developed as a result of Design Thinking outcomes and helps develop empathy for the target user.
However, this process is not exclusive to businesses nor elite designers; it is for all innovators from science and engineering to music and literature. It allows individuals to systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply techniques in daily life (Dam & Siang, 2020). Many of the world’s greatest brands such as Google and Apple utilize this process, and Design Thinking is being taught at top universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and others.
Humans like to believe their decision making and problem solver skills are rational and logical. However, the brain organizes information in patterns that allow it to make shortcuts when similar situations arise. This leaves tremendous room for error in judgement because of Cognitive Biases, which are a result of the brain’s attempt to simplify the processing of information (Nagarajan & Banerjee, 2019). These shortcuts are related to memory as well as problems with attention span. These biases can cause disruption to the process if not deeply understood by Design Thinking participants.
Empathy: The Key to Customer Understanding
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to empathize with the end user and understand their needs and goals (Wiecek, 2018). The goal of this step is to gain a deep, compassionate understanding of the people the product or service is designed for and the problems solved for them. Empathy helps designers and innovators set aside personal assumptions to fully understand the user and their needs.
Why is this important to the process? Understanding the needs of the end user results in better products and services. This includes experiences, insights, observations, and understandings of the end user in order to define the need, ideate a solution, prototype the end result, and test the product-market fit. The process is non-linear and will be a continuous process even after the final product is revealed. For example, mobile apps are great when they launch, but you have periodic updates that introduce new features or remove unused features so that the user experience is ultimately the best it can be — until the next release.
Why empathy and not sympathy? Easily and often confused with empathy, sympathy creates a detachment and superiority from the end user. The feelings are those of pity and sorrow for others, which is not helpful for designing great products and services. Sympathy does not allow for the absorption and deep understanding of the customer and cause issues down the line for the creative process.
Psychological Safety
Brainstorming, co-creation, and iterative prototype testing can only flourish under a safe working environment (Sawruk, 2019). The type of safety in this case is mental safety. According to Delizonna’s Harvard Business Review article (2017), “We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe.”
The world is a threatening place, and human evolution plays a major role in levels of safety. Trust is hard to earn and easily broken. This is why creating a safe environment is crucial for design thinkers as well as interviews with users or customers. People must feel safe to elicit trust, which gives the design thinker valuable insights into the future of their products and services. It also allows the design thinking team to explore their creativity freely without the fear of rejection. This is critical to gain the best possible creative solution to the problem at hand.
Methods of Empathy
There are many empathetic techniques to use with customers, including journey maps, multimedia, interviews, etc. However, there are three main categories that are based in psychology and behavioral science, including empathetic listening, empathetic laddering, and empathetic mapping (Brand Genetics, 2017). Techniques are up to the designer, but the ultimate goal is to truly understand and relate to the user or customer.
Empathetic Listening
Empathetic listening is a therapy and in-depth interviewing technique that involves confirming what was heard to understand the emotional meaning and drivers of the user needs. This technique works best in a face-to-face or one-to-one interview where feelings and desires are heard, synthesized, and confirmed by the interviewee. In this method, psychological safety plays a major role in undercovering the true needs, desires, wants, or dreams of the user. Without psychological safety, the interviewee may shield their true needs in order to look good in the interview.
Empathetic Laddering
Empathetic laddering is a common technique used in qualitative interviews to capture in-depth information by exploring answers of the interviewee with a focus on feeling. For example, the interviewer may ask how a user feels about certain products, features, functions, or services and then ladder up or down to better understand the emotional state of the user. Asking the user why or what they feel about specific answers drives into the deeper emotional mindset of the user. This allows the design thinker to step into the shoes of the user to better ideate and prototype the needs of the user.
Empathetic Mapping
Empathetic mapping helps the design thinker understand the emotional world of their end users. The goal of this technique is to map out what the user loves or hates and what they hope or fear about a product, service, feature, function, or situation. Some users may have very complex mappings, which uncover cognitive dimensions that may have been previously unknown to the designer. Mapping user desires will ultimately provide a rich canvas of materials for the designer to explore because insights are core to the user emotions.
Cognitive Biases
“The human brain is powerful but subject to limitations,” said Cherry (2017). These limitations are called cognitive biases. They are systematic faults in thinking that happens when someone processes information. The details are subconsciously skewed by their own personal experiences and often cloud decision-making abilities. Some of these are related to memory and others are related to problems with attention. Cognitive biases will influence a person’s world view, and that person may not even be aware of it.
Types of Cognitive Biases
There are over 50 types of cognitive biases based in beliefs, decision-making skills, behaviors, social skills, and memory. However, there are 14 common biases all design thinkers should be aware of to start great sessions and provide a psychologically safe environment.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect. This bias is when a person believes he or she is smarter and more capable than they really are. Their incompetence may be overshadowed by an inflated ego.
Confirmation Bias. Ideas are favored that confirm existing beliefs. In research or interviews be careful to find sources that do not always confirm your beliefs.
Actor-Observer Bias. This bias is when someone blames their actions on external forces while believing other people’s similar actions are internally caused.
Anchoring Bias. When the first bit of information is discovered, that is the focal point regardless of what follows. This is used a lot in pricing or marketing to make people believe they are getting a good deal.
Availability Heuristic. Deals with the overestimated value of information that is easily retrieved when prompted causing the researcher to miss important details or creative solutions.
Attention Bias. Selective hearing is a great example of this bias. Paying attention to some information but no other relevant information is a byproduct of attention bias.
Self-Serving Bias. People under this bias blame external forces for bad things that occur but take the credit for all the good things that occur around them as if they caused good luck or brought better skills to the table.
Hindsight Bias, or The Curse of Knowledge. When new information is presented that is obvious, people may tend to believe they knew it all along and assume others understand this as well. Hindsight really is 20/20.
Optimism/Pessimism Bias. People suffering from this bias will overestimate positive outcomes when things are going well and will overestimate negative outcomes when things are going poorly.
False Consensus Effect. The overvaluing of how much other people actually agree with you.
Halo Effect. The general impression of a person will influence how you feel about them, their character, and their work.
Misinformation Effect. Memories are fragile. Post-event information may influence memories and, in some cases, will override the memory or implant false memories.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy. Is the belief that if you put something in you should get something out. A sunk cost is something that cannot be gained back regardless of efforts to regain it. Cut your losses early.
Negativity Bias. A variation of pessimism bias. Winning is much better than losing in general. This bias shows up when negative outcomes outweighs positive outcomes.
Recognizing & Overcoming Biases
Recognizing and overcoming biases takes time and practice. Design thinkers will also struggle to understand their own biases. With time and practice, skills develop to help guide psychologically safe sessions. This is why having a trained moderator is so important to your design thinking sessions. Signs of bias include, blame, self-interests, taking credit, I-told-you-so mentalities, not synthesizing new information or excluding information, and assuming people get or align with someone’s thoughts can be some signs there are bias creeping into the session. Whether caused by emotions, motivations, limits, or social pressures, they should be understood and discussed as a group.
Overcoming biases starts with awareness of the bias or biases (Cherry, 2017). Once the bias is identified, design thinkers may then consider all the factors empathetically to design a plan to challenge the bias. A challenge of the bias places focus on the issue and helps the team or customer critically think to move beyond the problematic bias. These challenges can free creative spirit and enhance the safe environment necessary to solve problems.
Conclusion
In conclusion, design thinking is a wonderful method that can be used by all creators, businesspeople, or innovators to solve their most pressing problems creatively. By exploring problems in a psychologically safe zone, solutions and ideas can be freely exchanged without fear or worry. To ensure sessions are productive and safe, cognitive biases must be understood and discovered early in the design thinking process. Once the biases are challenged, the group or team may move beyond and get more creative with their problem-solving session.
References
Brand Genetics. (July 2017). Three Simple Empathy Techniques for Qualitative Research. Retrieved from https://brandgenetics.com/three-simple-empathy-techniques-for-qualitative-research/
Cherry, K. (July 2020). What is Cognitive Bias. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963
Dam, R. and Siang T. (August 2020). What is Design Thinking and Why is It So Popular? Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
Dam, R. and Siang, T. (September 2020). Design Thinking: Getting Started with Empathy. Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy
Delizonna, L. (August 2017). High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it
Lim, M. (November 2020). Being Aware of Biases with Design Thinking. Retrieved from https://nrev.jp/2020/04/11/design-thinkingbiases/
Nagarajan, J. and Banerjee, S. (2019). Design Thinking: A Bias-Reduction Strategy for Organizational Innovation. Retrieved from https://www.lntinfotech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Design-Thinking-A-Bias-Reduction-Strategy-For-Organizational-Innovation.pdf
Sawruk, C. (July 2019). Design Thinking: The Solution for Creative and Motivated Teams. Retrieved from https://www.achievers.com/blog/design-thinking-solution-creative-motivated-teams/
Wiecek, A. (August 2018). 9 Best Empathetic Research Methods to Help You Dig Deeper & Truly Understand Your Customer. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@alewiecek/9-best-empathic-research-methods-to-help-you-dig-deeper-truly-understand-your-customer-5a9b56c45e59