Empathise

Your design team will use empathy to learn from your communities. Through interviewing and observations, you will engage people in conversations to generate insights and understand what they care about and their challenges and needs.

We must empathise with those we are serving in order to identify and solve The problems that matter the most to them.

What steps can we take to ensure we deeply understand the context and complexities of a development challenge from the perspective of the community we are serving?

Empathise

Use the tools and resources in this guidebook to accomplish the goals below. Once your design team has achieved these objectives, you will be in a strong position to advance to the next phase in your design process. Use the reflection tools in the Design Work Journal to evaluate whether your design team is ready to move to the next phase.

Develop a research strategy based on the needs of your project

Determine responsibilities amongst members of the team and coordinate the logistics for your fieldwork

Put aside your understanding of the problem in order to empathise with the experiences and needs of the stakeholders closest to the problem

Engage stakeholders in the field, listen carefully to their stories and document your findings

Reflect on what you learned from your fieldwork in order to better understand the needs and motivations of the stakeholders closest to the problem

Iterate your design research strategy to adapt to emerging needs

Identify the stakeholders who provided the most insight into the problem

Begin to narrow in on the most relevant and surprising observations you gathered as a team

Overview of Empathise phase

Mindsets of Empathise phase

Elevate the lived experiences of stakeholders to be as important as technical expertise
Look carefully to understand potential problems and opportunities
Stay optimistic that you can solve the problem
Hold back on solving the problem until your team has learned from stakeholders
Get inspired by people, active listening is a source of creative inspiration

Overview of Empathise phase

Tools in the Empathise Phase are designed to help your team understand the experiences, emotions and motivations of others. Designers use specific design research methods to learn more about the needs of the stakeholders for whom they are designing.

Preparation for this part of the process should be done as a team. This phase of the design challenge will include: preparing to interview, interview questions and additional techniques, interview reflection tools, and observation and journey mapping tools.

Objectives of Empathise phase

The goal of this phase is to engage with the most relevant (and most underrepresented) stakeholders related to the problem you are working to solve.
This phase is focused on having dynamic conversations and gaining new perspectives through one-on-one conversations as well as immersion and observation experiences.