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Using Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reflections from the
UX Researcher, the Client, and the Method Expert
Luce Drouet
luce.drouet@uni.lu
University of Luxembourg
Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Froukje Sleeswijk Visser
f.sleeswijkvisser@tudelft.nl
Delft University of Technology
Delft, Netherlands
Carine Lallemand
carine.lallemand@uni.lu
University of Luxembourg
Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
ABSTRACT
Empathic design provides tools and frameworks supporting de-
signers to understand users’ experiences with products or services.
However, how does one hand over this empathic understanding of
users to other internal stakeholders shaping the service experience?
In this contribution, we reect on a three-year implementation of
an empathy-centric design approach in an industrial context with
a low user experience maturity from three dierent professional
viewpoints: ours as UX researchers, the one of a company manager,
and an expert researcher on empathy in design. These narrative
introspective accounts unveil some of the main benets, opportu-
nities, and challenges of implementing an empathy-centric design
approach in the industry. We discuss and confront them to prior
work. We contribute to the eld of empathic design with rich in-situ
research insights and principles for a successful empathic approach.
CCS CONCEPTS
•Human-centered computing
→
HCI design and evaluation
methods;User centered design.
KEYWORDS
Empathic design, Service design, Empathy-Centric Design, Em-
pathic research methods, Industry insights, Introspection
ACM Reference Format:
Luce Drouet, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, and Carine Lallemand. 2023. Using
Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reections from the UX Researcher,
the Client, and the Method Expert. In EmpathiCH workshop (EMPATHICH
’23), April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3588967.3589130
1 INTRODUCTION
“If the people within the organization do not share the attitude or
mindset that is needed for doing empathic design, then the eort is
likely to strand.” - Postma et al. [31]
Since the 1990s, empathic design methods [
11
,
15
] and frame-
works [
13
,
16
,
37
] support designers to step into users’ world and
step out [
16
]. The empathic design approach aims to deeply under-
stand users’ experiences [
8
,
21
,
26
]. Empathy is the art of taking
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.
EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
©2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0749-0/23/04.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3588967.3589130
users’ perspective (“stepping into their shoes”) [
17
] and enables
designers to know what users think and feel [
11
], as well as what
they say, do, and make [
35
]. In the service industry, prior work has
documented the positive inuence of empathy on service quality,
customer satisfaction, loyalty, and forgiveness [
2
,
4
,
23
]. Empathic
research supports business and innovation objectives such as gen-
erating user insights for opportunities, learning and rening ideas
and prototypes, and estimating potential solutions [11].
Design researchers have developed empathic methods for col-
lecting creative and inspiring user insights that support the design
of user-centered solutions. However, other stakeholders, like en-
gineers or frontline workers, also shape the user experience of
services but have limited skills in design or research. If empathy
has a positive inuence on the relationship between users and ser-
vice employees [
43
], it seems essential to help these employees to
approach users with an empathic mindset. At the organizational
level, increasing empathic understanding might lead to more ac-
ceptance and integration of user insights in an innovation process.
Service industry value is created in use. Consequently, it is easier
for a customer-centric driven organization to integrate UX insights
[
33
,
41
,
45
]. According to Patnaik
[29]
, empathy needs to be “wide-
spread throughout the large organization.” The author dened princi-
ples for companies to develop their empathic approach: hiring their
customers, or if not possible, adopting strategies to step into users’
shoes. Meeting users face-to-face is key as it triggers emotional
memories that will guide companies in the design of their solutions.
A successful empathic approach in the industry involves multiple
challenges, like switching from a rational approach to an empathic
one, turning users into partners, or engaging stakeholders in user
research [
31
]. Deploying such an approach requires rst convincing
the company management and involved stakeholders about its rele-
vance [
31
]. The stakeholders are then inclined to open their minds
and develop an interest in the users’ experiences (rst stage towards
empathy in design [
16
]). This creates opportunities to engage stake-
holders in user research, in a way that they would envision users
as long-term partners with expertise in the service [
44
]. However,
involving stakeholders in user research requires training their re-
search skills [
31
]. Non-experienced people usually focus on part of
the ndings only, taking into account individual users’ problems
instead of patterns, and struggle to translate insights into solutions.
The ability to take others’ perspectives and to switch between per-
spectives (self/other distinction [
6
]) throughout the design process
is challenging for novices [
38
]. Beyond research skills, Manrique
et al
. [22]
identied six strategies to engage stakeholders in such
an approach: managing their expectations, facilitating their under-
standing of the design process, making them participate, creating
a high level of excitement (developing an “enthusiastic mindset”),
EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Drouet, et al.
establishing trust in design professionals, and translating users’
insights.
In practice, design researchers rely on empathic methods and
techniques to establish an empathic approach inside projects and
get stakeholders engaged like empathy probes [
24
,
25
], generative
techniques [
35
], ethnographic and mapping methods [
10
,
39
], and
co-creation workshops [
1
,
39
]. Being able to assess stakeholders’
empathy and the eects of specic interventions can be an asset
in supporting the success of the empathic approach. The specic
challenges related to the measure of empathy in the eld have
been discussed by Drouet et al
. [9]
. While empathic design has
been developed in academia, design practitioners still lack guidance
on how to convey this to- and with- other internal stakeholders.
Information on how to successfully implement an empathic ap-
proach to conveying user insights/inputs in the industry is limited
[
14
,
31
]. What should be avoided and what needs to be anticipated
in stimulating empathic understanding through involving users
or conveying user insights with stakeholders inside companies?
More literature on applying empathic approaches inside companies
would guide practitioners in designing user-centric services and
technologies in closer collaboration with stakeholders. Document-
ing and reecting on the hands-on experiences of user researchers
and designers with empathic design in various industries would
deepen the research understanding of empathy in design.
This paper aims to reect on the deployment of empathic de-
sign interventions within a company with low UX maturity in the
railway industry. These interventions focus on ’stepping in’ the
users’ world part of the empathic process. Building on work by [
16
],
this process originally aims to develop designers’ empathy towards
users through four stages; (1) discovery, (2) immersion, (3) connec-
tion, and (4) detachment. Our interventions focus on techniques to
convey user input and insights to teams in the industry. They act as
a way to raise service employees’ interest (discovery stage) in users
and develop an empathic understanding. We oer reections on
these interventions from three viewpoints; our perspective as UX re-
searchers, the client represented by a company manager - and those
of an expert in research in empathy. Observations are discussed
from their experience, a key theme being the challenge of eliciting
interest and a sense of purpose in participating in the empathic
process interventions among the employees of the company.
The originality of our contribution lies in sharing a detailed rich
description of the resistances that empathic design and user-centric
design can encounter in the industry, as well as opportunities and
success factors. This paper is conveying an empathy lens to eval-
uate the three interventions in corporate reality. We contribute
to the empathic design eld by documenting the experience of
using empathic design methods with service stakeholders rather
than their typical focus on designers’ empathy. The insights we
share might inspire the research and design community on adapt-
ing and renewing empathic research design methods to help other
stakeholders involved in user experience than designers to get an
empathic knowledge of users. Noteworthy, this contribution does
not report each study’s ndings, documented in previous work or
ongoing publications. We rst introduce the context of the company
and the techniques used in the interventions. We then navigate
between viewpoints from the three actors of our project. These
introspective accounts unveil some of the main benets, opportuni-
ties, and challenges of implementing an approach to empathically
convey user insights in the industry.
2 APPLYING AN EMPATHIC APPROACH IN
INDUSTRY
2.1 The railway company context
The studied railway service is an established public company. Over
the years, the shift from freight service to passenger transporta-
tion required adapting the service oer (e.g., trains frequency),
expertise, processes, and company culture. The company recently
redened its service strategy to place the passenger at the center
of innovation. With about 5000 employees, the passenger side of
the company mostly includes technicians and engineering profes-
sionals. Service quality is represented, but there are no designers
and only a few creative proles working on corporate communi-
cation and passenger information. We assessed the company’s UX
maturity at the start of the project [
27
] as “limited” (phase 2), “UX
work is rare, done haphazardly, and lacking importance” [
30
]. This
aligns with the awareness phase of Chapman and Plewes [7]: “the
organization may be considering UX design, but applying very little
structure around UX activities. Often there is a signicant amount
of misunderstanding surrounding the real nature of UX design.” The
company management viewed their maturity as rather "emergent"
[
27
], dened as "a growing belief among the leadership team of the
value of design [...] and investments are being made in professional
hires" [
7
]. Despite an awareness of the need to increase UX compe-
tencies and to involve the passengers’ opinions in their innovation
process, the company’s UX knowledge is low. User research is not
systematically implemented. There is no UX strategy, nor measures
of the results of UX work. Our project paves the way toward a
user-centered approach to the service.
2.2 Our Empathy-Centric Design Approach
We deployed an empathic approach to convey user input focused
on valorizing users’ insights and developing empathy towards users
inside the organization. Based on the empathic design literature
[
11
,
15
,
16
,
21
], we selected user research methods to collect pas-
sengers’ experiences. A main requirement was their potential for
empathically handovering our ndings inside the organization (i.e.,
conveying empathy through the dissemination of user insights)
(Figure 1). We used three user research techniques, from the most
processed/synthetic to the most direct: (1) a physical journey map
(synthesis of user insights), (2) the love and breakup method [
12
]
(raw user data), and (3) co-creation workshops based on gener-
ative techniques [
35
] (direct contact with users). These methods
embed empathic characteristics [
15
]: user-centered, visual and tac-
tile, cheap and low tech, playful and fun, interpretative, tested in
reality, and creative components [
20
]. We also selected the methods
according to the opportunities brought by the project and user re-
search needs from the company (e.g., exploring passengers’ needs,
co-creating information with passengers). To measure the success
of our approach we developed the Empathy in Design Scale (EMPA-
D) [
9
], a self-reported measure of service stakeholders’ empathy
towards users. We administered this scale to the railway employees
before and/or after our interventions. We additionally studied the
Using Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reflections from the UX Researcher, the Client, and the Method Expert EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
employees’ level of empathic ability through empathic accuracy
techniques [
5
], and ad-hoc measures of their willingness to improve
the service and their interest in passengers.
2.2.1 Intervention 1: Interactive showcase of passengers’ journeys.
Based on existing passengers’ feedback collected through satisfac-
tion surveys, previous workshops with users, and customer com-
plaints, we created a multimedia installation showcasing passen-
gers’ journeys [
18
]. As a method, a physical journey map refers to
an installation where curated user research data is staged through
various mediums and sensory modalities to represent the journeys
of the users of a service or a product [
18
]. The experience was staged
to follow the temporal journey of the train passengers (Figure 1).
Scanning a ticket, visitors embark on the journey of three passen-
gers, able to discover their identity, follow their actions, hear their
thoughts, feel their emotions, and understand their pain points. At
the end of the experience, the employees were invited to generate
ideas and take action to improve the passenger experience. This
physical journey map is a dedicated tool to help employees navi-
gate through passengers’ insights and immerse themselves in the
passengers’ experience. This immersion act as a mean to convey
empathy [
16
]. The prototype has been developed and showcased to
the client. Yet, due to COVID-19, only a virtual version was tested
with ve employees.
2.2.2 Intervention 2: Broadcasting passengers’ love and breakup
declarations. We shared passengers’ feedback on their service expe-
rience with employees (N=230), as part of a mandatory information
session. We strived to trigger empathy towards the passengers by
broadcasting six passengers’ love and breakup declarations to the
service (out of 53 collected). We hypothesized that passengers’ emo-
tions elicited by the declarations would resonate with employees
and generate empathy. After each declaration, employees lled out
a questionnaire about the passengers’ emotions. One empathic ac-
curacy exercise [
6
] consisted in recognizing the emotions expressed
by the passengers. Measuring their emotional resonance, we asked
employees to select emotions they felt while listening to the decla-
ration. They then reported the main ideas they remembered, and
rated their learning, interest, and perceived ability to improve the
service. We measured the baseline level of employees’ empathic
ability using the EMPA-D scale [
9
] before the session. After the
intervention, we used a shorter single-item measure inspired by
[
36
]; "On a scale form 1 to 7, how would you rate your level of
empathy* for these passengers? (1=No empathy, 7=High empathy)
*empathy = putting yourself in the other person’s shoes". Finally,
we shared a synthesis of user insights introducing the passengers’
needs expressed in the declarations.
2.2.3 Intervention 3: Co-creation workshop employees and passen-
gers. We sought to trigger empathy through direct contact between
14 employees and 15 passengers during co-creation workshops. We
used generative techniques [
35
] to facilitate a dialogue on the spe-
cic issue of passenger information during railway maintenance.
The workshops entailed two experience mapping activities (map-
ping the current information devices used by passengers along
their journey and how their experience with information could be
improved) and the co-design of an information poster. These ac-
tivities aimed to provoke discussions with the users and to convey
empathic understanding through this direct contact. We measured
employees’ empathic ability before and after the workshop with the
EMPA-D scale [
9
]. A few months later we presented the ndings
to the employees, focusing on users’ habits, expectations of the
service as well as potential design directions. We asked them to ll
out an online questionnaire including EMPA-D and open questions
related to what they learned about the passengers, their interest,
and their ability to help improve the passenger experience.
To reect on our journey of implementing an empathic approach
in the industry, it is useful to make the assumptions underlying
our work explicit. At the start of the project, we expected that: (a)
creative and narrative methods would facilitate employees’ under-
standing of passengers’ experiences and trigger empathy, (b) the
user research methods used by designers could be transferred to
stakeholders with similar prerequisites and benets, (c) a change
in empathy could be measured as a result of our empathic design
interventions and inform on their eectiveness. The company was
at rst solution-oriented and expected prototypes and new designs
without being interested in user research as a process. The company
did not directly see what to expect from the empathic approach.
In the next sections, we rely on our own experiences through
three complementary perspectives to illustrate the benets, op-
portunities, and challenges of implementing an empathy-centric
design approach in the industry. We do not report the ndings of
each study but focus on the overarching experience of applying an
empathic approach in a company.
3 VIEWPOINT OF THE UX RESEARCHER
In this section, we present an introspective account of our experi-
ence leading empathic design interventions in an industrial con-
text. We documented these experiences using written notes and
through frequent exchanges with the research team both during
the intervention (reection-in-action) and retrospectively after the
intervention (reection-on-action). This section aims to reect on
our personal experience as researchers, acting as mediators of em-
pathic understanding of users. "Designer’s personal experiences
refer to "the collections of their individual experiences derived from
their direct observation of past real-life events and activities, as well
as their interaction with design artifacts and systems" [
46
]. Zhang
and Wakkary
[46]
explains the relevance of such practices in our
eld and their contributions to technology design.
3.0.1 The credibility of empathic design. A striking moment in the
project has been the reaction of a few employees to the passengers’
declarations. We imagined that the playful, emotional format of dec-
larations would trigger employees’ empathy towards passengers,
yet the breakup declarations generated some revolting comments
among employees, e.g., “stupid”, “seriously?!?” or blasts. The au-
dience was calmer while listening to the love declarations. After
the session, participants questioned the reliability of the content
presented, “53 interviews is not a lot”, “are the declarations sto-
ries or real customers’ feedback?”. Although these reactions were
scarce, we felt disturbed to the point of questioning the credibility
of our empathic approach. This was fortunately balanced by indi-
vidual employees’ positive messages after our design interventions
(e.g., “this is the reality”, “thanks for this experience.”) An employee
EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Drouet, et al.
Figure 1: A synthetic view of our empathic methods choices
recognized us on the train station platform and shared that they
had an interesting experience listening to passengers’ declarations.
Regarding the few negative reactions, the person explained that
frontline sta is facing “crazy situations” (e.g., drunk people that
frontline sta needs to manage) with customers at times. The co-
creation workshops did not lead to any comments questioning the
technique. Only one employee refused to participate in one activity
comparing employees’ and passengers’ points of view as they did
not see the value of the exercise. This anecdote raises questions
about the relevance of activities for stakeholders. They participated
in our intervention with the expectation to learn something rather
than for the sake of interacting with users. This resonates with
Walther et al
. [42]
’s work on training engineers’ empathy: our em-
pathic methods should take into account stakeholders’ expectations
and teach them that human interaction builds knowledge for their
profession. It requires convincing them that direct contact with end
users provides valuable knowledge for their innovations [40].
3.0.2 Stakeholders’ engagement. Besides navigating stakeholders’
busy schedules, avoiding the pressure to participate was a con-
cern. The company’s hierarchical structure imposed us to approach
employees through their managers. Attending the declaration ses-
sion was mandatory. Yet, being present does not guarantee being
sensitive or adhering to the approach. The challenge thus lies in en-
gaging the stakeholders in the intervention. 356 employees attended
the sessions. Noteworthily, 66 did not give consent to participate
in the research. It is hard to know whether this results from con-
cerns about sharing data with researchers associated with their
hierarchy, a refusal to engage in the research, or simply a lack of
attention to the checkbox in the form. We eventually collected 151
fully completed questionnaires. The research design involved some
redundancies and reduced the engagement of the stakeholders. We
adapted the protocol after the rst sessions, striving for a trade-o
between academic soundness and engaging restitution of insights.
This echoes [
22
]’s strategy of creating a high level of excitement
all along the approach. The topic of stakeholders’ engagement also
led us to wonder: to trigger stakeholders’ empathy towards users,
should researchers rst strive to show empathy towards the stake-
holders? Once the researcher is recognized as an ally, sharing users’
insights becomes easier. The voluntariness of employees to attend
such sessions seems like a prerequisite to establishing a trustwor-
thy space where emotional interest and empathy can grow. Then,
how do we trigger their interest and curiosity in the rst place?
In our case, empathic methods seemed to provoke debate among
employees. Debate in itself might be fertile ground to change the
mindset, leading eventually to empathy. An empathic approach
would thus require building relationships with stakeholders rst
before focusing on the objective of increasing empathy toward
users.
3.0.3 Data curation. The curation of which user data extracts to
use was a point of reection. We selected six extracts of passen-
gers’ declarations to broadcast, out of 53 full interviews. Similarly,
the physical journey map was a showcase of selected information.
Which criteria had to prevail? Stronger emotional data to trigger
empathy? Frequent or generic issues which would resonate with
a large part of employees? Unusual ndings to trigger curiosity?
Should the representativeness of the aspects raised by passengers
matter? We ended up broadcasting a love declaration rst, to avoid
demotivating stakeholders or creating reactance. While selecting
specic user data to trigger empathy, we wondered to which extent
we stayed faithful to the reality of the passenger experience.
3.0.4 Scalability of the empathic approach. Throughout our inter-
ventions, we often wondered how to reach a maximum number
of employees. While disseminating user research ndings from
the declarations could be done at a large scale with low cost, co-
creation workshops are harder to imagine at a large scale. The time
investment felt frustrating compared to the ratio of employees put
in direct contact with users. We however thought of this initiative
as an experimental testbed, which could be replicated. The stake-
holders participating could also possibly become ambassadors of
the empathic approach within the company. We invited the client to
observe the sessions. If the company envisioned the workshops as
mostly solution-oriented, we saw them as a way to initiate aware-
ness around the benets of user contact beyond pragmatic aspects.
More technological interventions such as the physical journey map
opened new opportunities but also challenges. On the one hand,
the client envisioned using the immersive installation during the
training of employees, particularly newly hired ones. The installa-
tion would not require the presence of the user researchers. It could
be accessed by anyone and raise curiosity thanks to its original
Using Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reflections from the UX Researcher, the Client, and the Method Expert EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
format. On the other hand, to stay up to date and continuously
feed empathic understanding, the techniques used need to provide
up-to-date data (e.g., live stream data instead of archival data in
the installation). We thought that the material used needed to be
easily accessible and the approach exible enough to get new stake-
holders on board all along the process (e.g., due to the turnover
of teams). We also reected more globally on the implementation
of our approach: which techniques to use? and in which order?
targeted at which audience? or how to best combine them. In partic-
ular, are some techniques more adapted to the context of a low UX
maturity than others? For which reasons? Part of our concerns for
measuring the empathy level of stakeholders related to this idea of
understanding the mechanism behind empathy-building and how
specic techniques were instrumental to this endeavor.
3.0.5 Triggering empathy rather than frustrations. In reaction to
the declarations, some employees shared judgmental comments
about passengers instead of showing understanding, e.g., “Being
nice [to passengers] doesn’t always pay o”, “Take scissors to chop
headphones” (to force passengers to listen to audio announcements
in trains and stations), “They [passengers] always bring up the same
topics.” Could empathic methods be counterproductive? Or can it
be successful for the majority yet not eective for some? We col-
lected similar answers after the co-creation workshops, e.g., “I have
empathy for customers. Unfortunately, empathy is not enough for
them.” Interestingly the workshops triggered employees’ comments
related to their own need for customers’ empathy, e.g., “I agree
with customers but we also have constraints and it is important
to accept them too,” “the exchange was more humanized” (than
exchanging with passengers at the station). During the workshop,
some employees also realized that passengers did not understand
the designed solutions. The processes of empathy seem to be en-
hanced when there is a mutual exchange: both parties step into
each other’s worlds. However, the employees still had the tendency
to explain to passengers why the service worked in this way. In
both interventions, employees concluded that the solution is to
“educate” users of the railway jargon. This is due to the fact that
service systems are usually designed from the system perspective:
“the service action ow thus goes from the organization to a cus-
tomer and not the other way round” [
39
]. Isn’t the role of the UX
researcher above all a mediator or negotiator? To avoid alienating
employees with such approaches, UX researchers would need to
welcome these comments with a particular open-mindedness and
skillfully deconstruct them with facts, e.g., educating 16.6 million
passengers per year does not seem realistic - clarifying messages
on information displays in stations seems easier.
4 VIEWPOINT OF THE CLIENT
In this section, we report on the viewpoint of a manager of the com-
pany on our empathic interventions. We gathered their perspective
through a questionnaire including sentence completions [
19
] – "At
the idea of using the love and breakup declarations method inside
the organization, I expected...", and open questions – e.g., "What
are the advantages, limitations, and challenges of using the love
and breakup declaration method inside the organization?".
4.0.1 Strategic use of the collected insights. The manager/client has
been positively surprised by the richness of the passengers’ input
provided by the declaration method and its relevance. The playful
format helped the company to talk about the underlying problems.
As explained by Rutkowska et al
. [32]
the playful aspect is one of the
nine qualities of insights (e.g., inspiring, memorable, experiential)
to reach the actionability of design research. An employee later
reused the passengers’ insights during a strategic meeting and the
synthesis of the declarations is used for strategic orientations. The
main challenge of this intervention has been to distill insights on
passengers’ needs from the declaration to get clear and signicant
messages to share internally.
4.0.2 Credibility of the findings. Despite interviewing 53 passen-
gers, ndings needed to be combined with a quantitative study to
validate the insights. The empathic methods deployed were not
sucient to eliminate entrenched beliefs. There are still employees
being unreceptive and uninterested in passengers’ experience. In
particular, the physical journey map method raised questions about
the return on investment of such an installation and its real impact
on frontline employees. The manager expressed concerns about
employees’ reactions, anticipating potential skeptical reactions.
4.0.3 Scalability of the empathic approach. The love and breakup
declarations were memorable to the client, because of the impact
they left on the company. During the session, employees laughed
out loud in a good mood while listening to passengers. These laughs
also demonstrated employees’ understanding of issues in the ser-
vice. The authenticity of passengers’ declarations stayed memorable
within the organization. According to the client, the co-creation
workshops have been an interesting method to confront employees’
and passengers’ perspectives on the passenger experience. They
revealed the gap between the employees’ assumptions and the ac-
tual passenger experience. It increased employees’ awareness of
customer needs. Users are involved in the design process of solu-
tions matching their needs. The memorability of the method was
however limited to the employees who participated. For others,
the presentation of the ndings has been less memorable and pow-
erful. Unfortunately, among employee participants or those who
attended the presentation, few are still reluctant to users’ insights.
The challenge lies in knowing how to present ndings without
demotivating the sta. From the client’s perspective, the declara-
tion method seemed more impactful than the co-creation work-
shop which aected a smaller population within the organization.
Does changing a company’s mindset and approach require empathy
techniques to spread users’ insights easily across the entire organi-
zation? Both techniques seem relevant and complementary in an
empathic approach. One aims to change the rational approach at
the organizational level, the other focuses on changing the mindset
of a specic team. It echoes the transformative power of techniques
to convey user insights described by Rutkowska et al. [33].
5 VIEWPOINT OF THE DESIGN EXPERT
We interviewed an external expert with 15 years of experience in
empathy in design to put our empathic approach into perspective in
a broader design practice, as well as industrial and societal contexts.
The expert is a University professor with an Industrial Design
EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Drouet, et al.
Engineering background, also working as an independent designer
for the industry and the public sector. Not involved in the presented
case study, the expert shared memorable moments around the use
of deploying empathic processes within several UX/design projects.
They unveiled challenges and good practices from their experiences.
Reecting rst on our process, the expert pointed out that our
design interventions only stepped into the users’ world. However,
the empathic approach includes also the act of stepping out of users’
world to be able to design with users’ perspective [
16
]. Among the
design interventions used, the journey map as a technique seemed
the most empathic. By synthesizing user research, journey maps
facilitate the appropriation of users’ feedback and expertise for
novice stakeholders in research. The love and breakup declarations
tell raw user stories, which makes the empathic understanding
more tedious. Regarding co-creation, its main purpose is not to
trigger empathic understanding, but to create a context in which
stakeholders participate in the process with users and listen to
users’ stories, implicitly could develop an empathic understanding.
The expert shared their own experiences with similar projects
to put our case study into perspective. A striking memorable mo-
ment happened during a three-year project in collaboration with
an international company. The main goal was to help the company
turn into a customer-centric organization over a period of ten years.
Time and budget were allocated to enable user researchers to con-
vey users’ insights properly (e.g., a database of videos about users’
home visits and organized workshops) and guide product teams in
using users’ insights to design solutions. While the project was well
advanced and the stakeholders (designers, managers, and engineers)
seemed well involved in the project, one of the designers made a
comment about the users’ lifestyle, which illustrated his prejudiced
view on users, despite having seen and worked with various user
insights. After all the work achieved to improve their understand-
ing of users, how was it possible to stay so narrow-minded? If even
design professionals struggle at times to stick to the mindset of
empathic understanding, expecting it from stakeholders when rst
exposed to user declarations seems unrealistic. Favorable condi-
tions should be set to prepare the organization and the individuals
to embrace empathic understanding. This includes starting small,
explaining the value of this approach, and helping the stakeholders
consider users on an equal term.
In contrast, a rewarding achievement happened while working
with another company that wanted users’ insights for their inno-
vation. The design and strategic teams were happy and involved
in the project. The developers’ team was invited to join, and vol-
untarily attended follow-up presentations and workshops about
user insights. They became more and more enthusiastic because
they could see direct implications and directions for their everyday
work. One example is that after a workshop on journey maps of
dierent segments, the developers voluntarily initiated a hackathon
to develop prototypes based on these journeys. As compared to
the railway company described, the expert notes that an organi-
zation with a higher UX maturity is likely to integrate empathic
interventions better. Overall, this case demonstrates the necessity
of emphasizing that such processes require an open mindset, and a
willingness to change perspectives, from those involved.
6 DISCUSSION
In this paper, we documented how an organization with low UX
maturity reacted to dierent interventions in their innovation pro-
cess to promote empathy towards their users. Similar to Postma
et al
. [31]
who reected on the challenges of empathic design at a
consumer product company, our work contributes to understand-
ing how the empathic design approach ts within the reality of an
industrial organization. We reected by unraveling three dierent
viewpoints on this case. What do these viewpoints teach us? This
case study unveiled the main benets, opportunities, and challenges
of conveying user insights in the industry empathically. It conveys
a rich description of the potential resistances that researchers and
designers can encounter while using empathic methods with ser-
vice stakeholders. It also provide insights into the suitability of
several empathic methods for corporate reality.
First, this three-year intervention illustrated the inherent inertia
of organizations. Conveying empathic understanding requires a
careful staging of activities and communication (as done by [
31
]),
and does not produce immediate observable results at the com-
pany’s scale. Empathy measurements made during or after each
intervention hint at an eect on the employees involved in some
dimensions of empathic understanding. Note that it is beyond the
scope of this contribution to report on these ndings, which are
documented in work ongoing publication. Altogether, our three
interventions led the company to a rst step into the users’ world
[
16
] for the employees participating in the design interventions.
These interventions mainly triggered awareness of the value of
users’ insights but also illustrated challenges around the credibility
of empathic design within the company. Similarly to Postma et al
.
[31]
, some employees were hesitant to use and trust our data which
led the company to run additional quantitative studies to validate
our conclusions. Employees realized the gap between their vision
of passenger experience and users’ reality. However, not all of them
connected with user insights emotionally, and many even struggled
to hear and embrace the feedback provided.
At the organization level, the passengers’ declarations were de-
scribed as the most memorable empathic design intervention thanks
to the long-lasting impression left (including critical comments)
and the wide reach of employees. Comparatively, the co-creation
workshops and the physical journey map involved fewer employ-
ees. The declarations created a form of empathic understanding,
which can be attributed to their narrative qualities [
3
]. However,
the declarations provoked comparatively more debate and the feel-
ing of not reaching a comprehensive overview of the meaning of
the ndings. This aligns with [
22
,
31
] showing that raw data is less
intelligible for non-researchers. The employees struggle to trans-
fer users’ creative input into solutions or actionable inputs. Our
physical journey map, as a design synthesis instrument, might miti-
gate this shortcoming. By facilitating personal connection with the
users [
28
] and triggering empathic responses, it might inspire new
user-centered solutions Mattelmäki et al
. [26]
. The direct contact
between stakeholders and users during the co-creation workshop
raised awareness and self-reection on the gap between perspec-
tives. Direct contact is known for increasing the quality of user-
centered solutions [
40
], and hence the employee participating in the
workshops later improved their solution based on the user inputs.
Using Empathy-Centric Design in Industry: Reflections from the UX Researcher, the Client, and the Method Expert EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany
In their current state, our interventions paved the way for deep-
ening the employee’s emotional interest toward users and willing-
ness to get immersed in their experience (discovery and immersion
phases of Kouprie and Sleeswijk Visser
[16]
). However, throughout
the interventions, we noticed some tensions between the value as
perceived by the user researcher and the one seen by the client.
This echoes Manrique et al
. [22]
’s recommendation to manage
the client’s expectations to engage them in user research. It also
highlights a crucial step, which we missed, of introducing to stake-
holders the goal of an empathic approach before deploying specic
empathic techniques. Aligned with [
31
], we believe that this could
support a move from ’informing’ stakeholders to ’engaging’ them.
6.1 Limitations and Future Work
Besides the ones already discussed, our empathic approach involved
several limitations. While we aimed at reaching as many employees
as possible, we have at times lost sight of setting up the open-
mindset key to developing an empathic approach [
34
]. Starting
with a smaller group of volunteer and open-minded stakeholders
could have built a solid core team to deploy the empathic design
interventions, which ended up more disparate and dispersed. When
using empathic interventions with employees whose attendance is
required, it is even more important to clarify the objective of such
approach to anticipate the resistances. Furthermore, as pointed out
by the design expert, our design interventions focused mostly on
activities stepping into the users’ world, overlooking activities for
stepping out (in reference to the connection and detachment phases
of [
16
]). We thus acknowledge that our ndings do not reect the
entire empathy-centric design process with stakeholders. Regarding
the generalization of our ndings, it would have been interesting
to run the same interventions in other companies’ contexts to
investigate patterns of eects and reduce the subjectivity of our
ndings. Although our contribution is not grounded in a traditional
rationalist HCI research, our reections contribute to the eld of
empathic design by addressing the need for more designers and
researchers’ personal experiences research [
46
]. Mapping empathic
design methods according to which empathy characteristics they
embed and which eects they produce is an interesting avenue
for future work. Such an analytical overview should be supported
by empirical studies conducted with an experimental outlook. It
would support designers in making informed decisions about which
empathy-centric interventions to use in a specic context.
6.2 Principles for Using Empathy-Centric
Design in Industry
Building on our researcher experience and prior work on empathic
design, we summarize some take-away messages and implications
for design, which we encourage the community to consolidate in
future work. These principles are not to be understood as validated
experimental ndings, but as the result of an introspective and
reective analysis of a longitudinal eld intervention.
6.2.1 Creating a favorable environment. The empathic approach
requires a favorable and open-minded environment. Companies
willing to adopt such an approach need to be introduced to why
design thinking, co-creation activities, and user involvement can be
relevant to their business and innovation processes. For instance,
companies with a low UX maturity might attempt to collaborate
with users without success if they organize product-oriented co-
creation workshops instead of basing them on user experience.
Such an approach may deliver product ideas but will not develop
empathic understanding. To leverage an open-minded attitude from
stakeholders, the challenge lies in opening them up and creating
the appropriate mental space. This open mindset goes hand in hand
with considering users on an equal term. As users are experts in
their everyday service and product use, their knowledge needs to
be considered valid and legitimate.
6.2.2 Starting small. Facilitating an empathic approach starts with
small groups of users and stakeholders. Setting up a plan involving
every stakeholder would run the risk to slow down the process
(e.g., by continuously postponing the start of user research). Simple
techniques aiming to step into users’ shoes, such as role-playing, are
excellent onboarding steps. At the start, (quantitative) research can
be used to back up the rst users’ insights to increase the approach
credibility perception of the stakeholders.
6.2.3 Sustaining the empathic approach. The key to sustaining an
empathy-centric approach lies in emphasizing the value of empathic
understanding for the company (e.g., business and innovation) and
for the stakeholders (e.g., counting on users’ expertise). The main
strategy to convey the "why" is to share best practices, successful
examples, and business stories. "User research led to this solution
that generated millions of revenues". Nonetheless, one should pre-
vent stakeholders to believe that initiatives are limited to product-
oriented thinking. The empathic understanding of users requires
stepping out of the stakeholders’ professional role to engage and
connect with users’ emotions. It is not expected for stakeholders
to go as far as a user researcher would, but simply to experiment
with the empathic approach and grasp its meaning. Empathy is
not a simple check-o task but implies a continuous process of
connecting with others varying with the contexts.
6.2.4 The empathic approach is not a substitute for user research.
The integration of user insights is key to user-centered innova-
tion. A crucial part of user research is guiding stakeholders in the
sense-making of the users’ input, and the fact of taking the per-
spectives of end-users of the products and services they provide.
Empathic understanding is one aspect supporting a smooth user
insights integration, yet it should not be seen as a holy grail within
organizations. The empathic approach is solely a part of user re-
search but does not replace other relevant techniques. Involving a
variety of proles is needed, including some that mainly focus on
solving complex technical problems while others focus on humans.
Both approaches feed on each other. The user researchers remain
guarantors of ethical and critical research all along the process.
7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we synthesized reections about empathy-centric
interventions conducted in an industrial context within the past
three years. We presented and discussed three dierent viewpoints
on this case study: our perspective as UX researcher, the client
represented by a company manager - and those of an expert in
research in empathy. Through this contribution, we deepened the
understanding of empathic approaches’ challenges and limitations
EMPATHICH ’23, April 23, 2023, Hamburg, Germany Drouet, et al.
when deployed in a company. We derived principles that can sup-
port designers willing to implement an empathy-centric design
approach in a company. The insights we share might also inspire
the community to adapt and renew empathic research design meth-
ods in order to help the service stakeholders, beyond designers, to
get an empathic understanding of users.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Sophie Lacour, Tom Nickels, and the Lux-
embourgish Railway Company CFL for supporting this project. We
are also grateful for the support received from various stakeholders
within the company during the past 3 years. Thank you also to
Sophie Doublet for her contribution to some analyses and reporting
tasks, and to Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy and the HCI research group
members for the continuous fruitful exchanges on this project.
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