April 28, 2017
Newsletter

Let’s Talk About:

Getting Outside Yourself

The ability to empathize with users, teams, coworkers, and society at large is recognized as one of the most essential and critical skills for a user experience designer—but why should an empathetic mindset be limited to UX professionals? Won’t our products and experiences be more meaningful, useful, and responsible if everyone takes a shared responsibility to develop this skill?

Anyone creating and building digital products must develop an empathetic mindset. We must all learn to appreciate and understand how others work, think, and interact. Without that, we’re left with biases and assumptions that lack awareness of a broader context and are heavily influenced by our personal emotions, goals, and motivations rather than those for whom we’re designing and building.

Presenting Design with Empathy


Community Thoughts on Getting Outside Yourself...

  1. 1. Combatting unconscious bias in design Without realizing it, biases can manifest themselves into our design decisions. How can we create systems that respond to diversity and measure the impact it will have on the end user?
  2. 2. Inclusive Design: Designing for People Different than You Here are a few ways to start taking responsibility for inclusivity, as designers.
  3. 3. Myth: You are like your users When designing a website, it’s easy to assume that everybody is like you. However, this leads to a strong bias and often ends in an inefficient design.
  4. 4. It’s Time to Listen As UX professionals, our purpose is to facilitate understanding of people’s unmet needs. Yet many of us have a tendency to want to fix things, and become attached to our ideas of how it should be done.

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