Empathy is the ability designers gain from research to understand users’ problems, needs and desires fully so that they can design the best solutions for users. Designers strive for empathy by deeply probing users’ worlds, to define their precise problems and then to ideate towards solutions that improve users’ lives.
“What makes us human is what is delightful.”
— Genevieve Bell, Anthropologist noted for cultural-practice-and-technological-development work
See why empathy is absolutely vital in design.
To understand your users/customers fully, you must see and feel their worlds from their perspective. And to access these core vantage points, you’ll first need the right research methods. You want to gather reliable information from which you can distill your users’ essences, as personas, to take forward in your design process. In user-centered design, user experience (UX) design and elsewhere, you need empathy. It even has a themed stage in the design thinking process: Empathize.
Your biggest challenge is to dig deep into your users’/customers’ subconscious; they can’t fully explain their precise needs. Designing for the human world is tricky, especially when users/customers access brands across many touchpoints and channels (e.g., online). In service design, ethnography is key to understanding their habits, motivations, pain points, values and whatever else influences what they think, feel, say and do on their user journeys. In ethnographic field studies, you observe what these users/customers do. Four methods are:
Shadowing – following users/customers around to get a day-in-the-life-of feel of what they experience.
Unstructured/Semi-structured Interviews – exploring hard-to-reach areas of their behavior in a naturalistic atmosphere, not systematically questioning them. This “hanging out” with them yields more honest, accurate insights. It’s usually better to conduct semi-structured interviews, strung loosely around an “areas-to-cover” framework in a discussion guide.
Diary Studies – letting users self-report. As with surveys, you rely on users to record things for you. Unlike surveys, diary studies help to capture “after-effects” over (typically) a 1-to-2-week period. Note: diary studies alone can’t reveal pain points effectively; they’re best combined with interviews.
Video Ethnography – video-recording enough material of participants in their environment as users/customers to gather insights about them.
It’s best to remain informal and open-minded.
Here’s what to consider for an ethnographic study where you directly observe users interacting with a service (e.g., booking short-stay accommodation):
Introduction – Thank them and briefly explain your research’s purpose.
Context – Look around and note your users’ surroundings.
Note/observe/ask – Encourage them to continue their activities as though you weren’t there, letting you observe and ask as few questions as possible. When you do ask questions, ensure they’re open-ended and encourage more observations (e.g., “How?”).
Touchpoints & Channels – Pay attention to the touchpoints and service channels your users interact with (e.g., paying for room/property bookings by phone).
Tools – Note which tools these customers use throughout their journey.
Familiarity with Domain/Task – Note how comfortable they are with the various tools and tasks they use/perform.
Service Artifacts – Pay attention to the artifacts that are important throughout the service experience between the customers’ various touchpoints:
Physical items
Cognitive constructs (e.g., the customer’s changing understanding of the steps involved)
Social or emotional elements (e.g., hunting for a lockbox in an unfamiliar street)
Disconnects – Notice these, which happen anytime customers experience a problem with the service (e.g., they can’t access the accommodation/property).
Needed ecosystem support – Watch for the points in the service where support from the backstage of the service is needed (e.g., the service-providing organization/agency must contact the landlord if the customer can’t).
Wrap-up – Thank them at the end of the session and answer any relevant questions they have.
For Semi-structured interviews, order and ask your questions properly, stringing them loosely in a discussion guide featuring the following types of questions:
Introductory – e.g., “What was it like the last time you…?”
Follow-up – on what they’ve just said.
Probing – ask them to give an example/explain something.
Specifying – if their descriptions are too general.
Direct – to introduce topics, etc.
Indirect – if you sense a direct question might lead the user, etc.
Structuring – to get back on-topic, etc.
Interpreting – to confirm you’ve understood the previous answer correctly.
Also, let silence help the user/customer give you honest, unpressured answers.
From your findings, you can now create personas, empathy maps and user journey maps (image below) / customer journey maps.
Tips
Service safaris are a great way to go into the field to see what users experience.
Brainstorming with your team can help reveal the right, open-ended questions to ask users.
Engage with extreme users – If you can find and interview users who face greater challenges, you’ll find the full scope of problems which all users can encounter.
Find effective analogies to draw parallels between users’ problems and problems in other fields, to find further insights.
Bodystorming – Wearing equipment gives you first-hand experience of what your users encounter in their environment (e.g., goggles to simulate vision problems).
Overall, remember: what users/customers do and what they say they do are two different things.
© Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0
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Here’s a deep-dive view of empathy.
UX designers apply empathy throughout the design process by stepping into the users' shoes at every stage—from research to testing. They start by actively listening to users during interviews and observing behavior during field studies. These early steps help designers understand users’ goals, pain points, and emotions.
Next, they create personas and empathy maps that capture the user’s mindset. This keeps the user’s voice front and center during ideation and wireframing. During prototyping, designers walk through user journeys to spot emotional friction points and smooth them out. Lastly, they test with real users, listen deeply to feedback, and revise designs based on lived experiences—not assumptions.
A great example is how IDEO’s human-centered design process begins with empathy, allowing them to redesign everything from hospital experiences to toothpaste packaging with emotional impact in mind.
Watch as Author and Human-Computer Interaction Expert, Professor Alan Dix explains important points about personas:
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In UX design, empathy and sympathy might seem similar, but they serve very different purposes. Empathy means feeling with the user—you understand their emotions because you mentally walk in their shoes. Sympathy, on the other hand, means feeling for someone—more like observing their struggle from a distance and feeling sorry for them.
Empathy drives better design because it helps designers connect with users on a deeper level. Instead of designing out of pity, designers solve real problems by seeing the world through the user’s lens. For instance, when designing for users with disabilities, empathy leads to inclusive features. Sympathy might just result in a sad acknowledgment with no real impact, and empathy is far better to bring on board to design for users of all ability levels.
The key takeaway is that sympathy can tend to create distance while empathy builds bridges. We can also look at compassionate empathy—or empathic concern—which is about truly understanding and sharing someone’s emotional experience and then being motivated to help or take supportive action with that understanding as the basis. That differs from sympathy as the latter generally refers to feeling pity or sorrow for what someone else is going through without fully sharing in their emotional state or not having the same drive to fix things so they’re not distressed.
Watch our video about empathy in design:
Enjoy our Master Class User Journey Mapping for Better UX with Kelly Jura, Vice-President, Brand & User Experience at ScreenPal.
Use an empathy map early in a UX project—ideally right after initial user research. This is when you’ve gathered interviews, observations, or surveys and need to make sense of the emotional and behavioral patterns behind user actions. Mapping what users think, feel, say, and do turns raw data into a shared understanding that teams can act on.
Empathy maps work best during the ideation phase. They help generate ideas rooted in real user needs and align stakeholders around those needs. They’re also useful before prototyping to validate that concepts address the emotional and cognitive realities of your users.
It’s wise to revisit empathy maps during usability testing to check if the design still resonates with the user perspective you uncovered early on.
Read our piece Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It for further insights.
To avoid bias while practicing empathy in UX research, start by becoming and staying aware of your own assumptions. Designers often project personal experiences onto users without realizing it. Combat this by asking open-ended questions and actively listening, not leading.
Use diverse user samples to avoid “sample bias”—designers who only interview users like themselves risk designing for a narrow audience. Furthermore, practice reflexivity: after each research session, reflect on how your own background might influence your interpretations.
Record and transcribe sessions to ensure team members hear users’ actual voices, not filtered impressions. And use tools like affinity diagrams to let patterns emerge from data, not preconceptions.
Watch as CEO of Experience Dynamics, Frank Spillers explains important points about designer bias:
Enjoy our Master Class User Stories Don't Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories with William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd.
To spot user pain points through empathy, start by deeply listening to users. Don’t just focus on what they say—watch what they do, how they react, and where they hesitate. Emotional cues like frustration, confusion, or hesitation often point to underlying pain points.
Use open-ended interviews to let users tell their stories. Ask questions like: “What’s the hardest part of using this product?” or “When was the last time you felt stuck?” Then, analyze responses with empathy maps or journey maps to pinpoint where emotions dip. Observation matters, too. During usability tests, note moments of struggle or workarounds—those signal design gaps. Look beyond surface feedback to understand the “why” behind user behavior.
Watch as Professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at University College London (UCL), Ann Blandford explains important points about user interviews:
Enjoy our Master Class User Stories Don't Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories with William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd.
To foster empathy in cross-functional design teams, create direct connections between team members and users. Bring engineers, product managers, and marketers into user interviews or usability tests—seeing user struggles firsthand creates a shared emotional anchor that unites the team around real needs.
Use tools like empathy maps or journey maps in workshops to translate user research into emotional insights that everyone can relate to. Encourage storytelling: have team members reflect on what resonated with them most from a user session.
Lead by example—when design leaders prioritize empathy, it becomes a cultural value. And celebrate moments where empathetic decisions led to better outcomes.
Companies like Atlassian and IDEO routinely integrate empathy into cross-functional collaboration, resulting in stronger alignment and more user-centered solutions.
Watch as UX Designer and Author of Build Better Products and UX for Lean Startups, Laura Klein explains important points about cross-functional collaboration:
Enjoy our Master Class User Journey Mapping for Better UX with Kelly Jura, Vice-President, Brand & User Experience at ScreenPal.
Kolko, J. (2014). Well-designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love. Harvard Business Review Press.
Jon Kolko’s Well-Designed presents a compelling case for embedding empathy into the heart of the product design process. Drawing on real-world examples and case studies, Kolko outlines how emotionally intelligent design fosters innovation and builds stronger connections between users and products. The book stresses that empathy is not just a soft skill, but a critical tool for identifying real user problems and designing meaningful solutions. Its blend of actionable frameworks and philosophical insights has made it a foundational read in UX and product design. The book’s influence is especially strong among design leaders and product teams aiming to humanize digital experiences.
Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.
In Emotional Design, UX pioneer Don Norman reveals how emotions influence our interactions with everyday products. He presents a framework of three design levels—visceral, behavioral, and reflective—that shape user experience beyond mere usability. The book integrates cognitive science with product design, exploring why aesthetically pleasing or emotionally resonant products succeed. Norman uses real-life examples to show how emotion-rich design enhances satisfaction and loyalty. This influential work shifted the design world’s focus from function alone to the emotional resonance of objects. It remains foundational for UX designers, product developers, and innovators seeking to understand the psychological depth of user-product relationships.
Mattelmäki, T., & Battarbee, K. (2002). Empathy probes. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2002, 266–271.
In this influential paper, Mattelmäki and Battarbee introduce "empathy probes" as a method for designers to gain deep insights into users’ personal experiences and contexts. By providing participants with specially designed material packages—such as diaries, cameras, and postcards—users document aspects of their daily lives, emotions, and interactions. This approach enables designers to move beyond rational and practical considerations, fostering a more profound understanding of users’ subjective experiences. The study exemplifies how empathy probes can bridge the gap between designers and users, leading to more human-centered and contextually relevant design solutions. This method has since become a cornerstone in user-centered design practices, emphasizing the importance of empathy in the design process.
Leonard, D., & Rayport, J. F. (1997). Spark innovation through empathic design. Harvard Business Review, 75(6), 102–113.
In this seminal article, Leonard and Rayport introduce the concept of empathic design, emphasizing the importance of observing customers in their natural environments to uncover unarticulated needs and inspire innovation. They outline a five-step process—observation, capturing data, reflection and analysis, brainstorming for solutions, and developing prototypes—that enables companies to identify latent customer needs and redirect existing technological capabilities toward new business opportunities. This approach has been influential in shifting product development strategies from traditional market research to more immersive, user-centered methods, fostering a deeper understanding of customer experiences and driving innovative solutions.
Empathy plays a central role in UX design—it lets designers relate to the problems and experiences their users have. When designers empathize, they don’t just guess user needs; they understand them deeply. That understanding helps them create experiences that feel intuitive, useful, and human-centered.
Empathy drives designers to ground design decisions in real user behavior, not assumptions. For example, it helped Airbnb’s founders identify why hosts were struggling—poor photos—and led to a redesign of the listing process. It wasn’t a tech issue. It was a human one.
Designers can cultivate empathy by conducting user interviews, observing real-world behavior, and mapping emotional user journeys. Always design with the user—as in, seeing things from their perspective—not just for them as a target audience to sell something to.
Watch our video about empathy in design:
Enjoy our Master Class User Journey Mapping for Better UX with Kelly Jura, Vice-President, Brand & User Experience at ScreenPal.
UX designers use specific techniques to build empathy and truly understand user needs. One of the most powerful is user interviews—open-ended conversations that reveal goals, frustrations, and emotional triggers. Field studies and contextual inquiries go a step further by placing designers in users’ real environments to observe behavior firsthand.
Another effective technique is empathy mapping, where teams document what users think, feel, say, and do. This keeps user emotions at the center of the design process. Personas—fictitious representations of users based on real data—also help maintain a constant connection to user stories. And during journey mapping, designers visualize the user’s path and identify emotional highs and lows.
Watch as Professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at University College London (UCL), Ann Blandford explains important points about user interviews:
Enjoy our Master Class User Stories Don't Help Users: Introducing Persona Stories with William Hudson, User Experience Strategist and Founder of Syntagm Ltd.
Here's the entire UX literature on Empathy in UX/UI Design by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:
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