Empathy As A Skill: How Social Work Helped Me Become a UX Researcher

I worked hard to gain the child and family’s trust with the goal of cultivating resilience, repairing familial relationships, and helping them to realise their goals and potential.

Achieving these goals was quite the challenge. Children who are looked after have experienced significant trauma, making trusting new people difficult. It’s also uncommon for social workers to be involved in children’s lives, creating a sense of stigma. I needed to work hard to ensure I established rapport, identified the right problems, and asked the right questions to ensure I was promoting the most effective kind of change. Sound familiar? These are the skills that I utilise everyday as a user experience researcher.

User research, much like social work, is all about understanding why people behave the way they do, how they interact with the systems around them, and improving their experiences. In social work, we do this by asking questions to establish patterns of behaviour and difficulties they encounter, and then develop interventions to hopefully make positive change. In user research, we learn about users’ behavioural patterns both within and outside of a product or system, identify how those patterns impact their experience, then recommend changes to stakeholders to improve the user’s experience. People are a product of their environment, family history, and culture and understanding the systems that surround our users helps to develop deeper insight into how they expect products to work.

To identify our user’s expectations, I routinely reach for empathy from my social work toolkit. Empathy is at the core of my everyday practice. It allows me to focus solely on the user’s experience with the product. It helps me step away from my preconceived notions and jump into uncharted waters without hesitation. Through empathy, I’m putting myself in the user’s shoes and yielding rich and actionable insights for stakeholders.

I just recently worked on a project with a car manufacturer. Personally, I just need a car that can get me from Point A to B efficiently and safely. If I went into my sessions with this mentality, it would limit the amount of insight I could gather. Our participants loved talking about their cars and purchasing journey. I made sure to drill down on what aspects they loved about purchasing a car, why, and how it could be improved. A pattern that emerged was a bit surprising. They extolled about the personalised details of their current cars, but when it came to sharing their car configurating experience, nothing was memorable. Talking about cars was exciting, but configuring a car was at best a forgetful experience, at worst a stressful one. We made recommendations to our client on how to make the car configuration experience enjoyable and memorable to entice car enthusiasts to purchase and share their experience with fellow gear heads. If I stayed in my lane (I couldn’t help myself!), I wouldn’t have uncovered what truly drove this segment of users to purchase cars.

Empathy is a powerful tool that should be in every user researcher’s toolbox. Use it to empower users to share their experiences and authentic selves. By employing empathy, you’ll deliver richer insights to stakeholders and make a meaningful impact for users. It’ll also enable you to be the best researcher you can be. You don’t need to personally experience every difficulty or success your users face to establish rapport and yield deep insights. Take a break from yourself and dive into the world of the person you’re speaking to head first. That’s how you truly understand their experiences and develop better ones.