Nurturing Empathy between UX Design Teams and Users in Digitally-Mediated User Research

Date: 
Tuesday 2 October 2018
Timeslot: 
15:05-15:30
Organisers or author: 
Florian Lachner, Hanna Schneider, Lisa Simon, Andreas Butz

Full paper.

Creating an empathic, holistic understanding of the user experience and communicating it within the design team is a constant challenge in UX design projects. This paper explores the potential of digital tools to support designers and researchers in this task. We explored the needs of different stakeholders in semi-structured interviews and hosted an ideation workshop to generate design ideas for suitable software tools. Based on the resulting insights and ideas, we implemented a first prototype that balances individual feedback visualizations with detaileduserprofiles,auserjourneyandacommunicationfeature. The prototype was assessed in seven focus groups with a total of 26 participants and with the AttrakDiff questionnaire. We found out that the persona view, the user journey view and the flexible filters of our prototype allowed designers to gain a insightful picture of users’ experiences. Future work is needed to better understand how digitally-mediated empathic relationships evolve over the long term.