Putting yourself in your users’ shoes, understanding their needs, knowing their habits, being able to interact with them—these are the keys to initiating the empathy phase, the first phase of design thinking. Professionals who adopt this approach rethink how their company is organized. What if you were next? We’re sharing the best ways to kick off a user-centric strategy.

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What is design thinking?

Before diving into the characteristics of empathy, let’s explain more broadly what design thinking is. This method, which breaks away from traditional project management in companies, aims to turn ideas and projects into concrete, feasible actions. This mindset is often initiated through a collaborative project and therefore mobilizes collective intelligence. Teams with diverse profiles come together (engineers, designers, communicators, users) and follow the 5 stages of design thinking: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

This approach, which is characterized by being iterative, allows professionals practicing the different stages to return at any time to the previous phase. The goal is to improve ideas in case of errors or roadblocks. Imagine that when testing your prototype, your product does not achieve the expected effect with your users. This confrontation will highlight a harsh reality: the actions defined in previous phases need to be revised. Design thinking therefore leads you to ask the right questions, think critically, and optimize your actions.

What is empathy?

Let’s take a closer look at the first stage of design thinking: empathy. What is it? It is the ability to implement actions to refine your knowledge of users, whom researchers even go so far as to call “experiencers.”

Let’s look more closely at the definition of empathy. According to Larousse, it is an intuitive ability to put oneself in others’ shoes and perceive what they are feeling. Through active listening—that is, observation, benevolence, paraphrasing, and the ability to broaden the topic—professionals adopting the design thinking method can identify potential sticking points.

However, we should distinguish empathy from compassion. If the first concept refers to putting yourself in someone’s place, the second implies emotionally experiencing the situation with them. Your challenge: maintain a balance between the two while protecting yourself!

Our advice: avoid assumptions and approximations; adopt a user-centric approach based on facts, because you will never know users’ needs without their input.

What process should you follow for empathy?

Let’s break down together the three main actions of the empathy phase: observation, exchange, and immersion.

1. Observe user behavior

First, the right behavior to adopt is observation: pay attention to remarks, positive or negative, customer reviews available on certain platforms, comments left on social media, private messages, and responses provided in satisfaction surveys. The empathy map can be particularly useful. This tool is actually a visual summary bringing together revealed information and unknown information to be sought. It distinguishes 4 elements:

• what users say,

• what they think,

• what they do,

• and what they feel.

Note that what users say can sometimes be contradictory to what they think. For example, a user may claim to have enjoyed a meal in an Italian restaurant while their nonverbal communication expresses the opposite: low voice volume, evasive gaze, etc. We then say their verbal and nonverbal communication are not aligned and that there is no congruence. This is why, in your design thinking approach, you must seek feedback from your users.

However, nothing guarantees that internet users will fully share the depth of their thoughts. Take the example of someone complaining on Google My Business about a low food-to-plate ratio. In their comment, the proportion is not defined, which can distort interpretation. What does this internet user mean by a low ratio? Did other restaurant customers share this opinion? Did they complain when receiving their dish, at the end of the meal, or never publicly? Were they still hungry afterward? Did they then eat somewhere else? Is their disappointment explained by high expectations? Did they stop going to this place after this bad experience? Did they share their view with people close to them? You can see the multitude of questions you need to ask and discuss with your customers or prospects.

Defining missing user feedback and going to get it are best practices for starting your empathy phase on a solid foundation.

2. Gather key information through exchange

Information can be gathered through conversations on social media, responses left in satisfaction surveys, comments given during in-person exchanges, and so on. Through this, you can highlight internet users’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Scheduling questionnaires to send (by email, SMS, chat, etc.), oral interviews by phone or in person (following a purchase, during a check-in, as part of an event invitation) are also possible actions. Thus, a question such as “How do you rate the site design?” will lead to open responses. Depending on respondents’ inspiration, the opinions provided can deliver useful information with a view to optimizing strategy. Conversely, a closed question like “Do you like our latest product?” will produce precise answers—“yes, very much,” “yes, somewhat,” “not really,” “not at all”—but without customer verbatims.

We therefore recommend preparing in advance a list of topics on which to survey your customers. After that, you can draft a satisfaction questionnaire tied to the preferred theme, alternating between open and closed questions. Be careful, however, to remain as neutral as possible in how you phrase your questions, so as not to steer the response.

It is best to conduct oral or in-person exchanges with your promoters, passives, and detractors alike. Their differing views can provide constructive feedback. Start with interrogative words such as “What” to set the context, “How” to surface actions taken, or “Why” to get closer to the original reason.

The “5 Whys” technique remains particularly effective for finding the root cause of the problem. By asking yourself five times and using the answer to the previous “why” to define a new question, the link between answers 1 and 5 will be weak—and that is a good thing, because it indicates the exercise succeeded. In this respect, it is not an easy process, as close observation and introspection are essential. You must be ready to question yourself and not stop at the first answers provided.

3. Immerse yourself in your audience’s environment

A good practice during the empathy phase is to finish by putting yourself in the shoes of your typical consumers. Let’s assume you sell anti-sweat T-shirts; it may be useful to go to places most commonly frequented by your consumers, such as gyms, parks, race tracks, etc. Experiment with what they do, use their social networks (including lesser-known ones), capture the moment when the need related to sweating is felt, understand what motivates them, identify factors that could potentially be blocking—these are some suitable actions for immersing yourself in your target audience’s world.

It can then be useful to ask what reasons would lead users to turn to your project. The idea here is not to present your sales arguments, but to adopt your users’ mindset and language. To return to the anti-sweat T-shirt example, from the brand’s point of view, you will certainly highlight comfort, eco-responsibility, and no visible stains. However, if you put yourself in your consumers’ shoes, you can mention favorable arguments such as wanting to feel cleaner during a workout, but also not wanting a T-shirt that is too tight or even unflattering.

Ultimately, immersion will allow you to build your persona profile, in which you will present a potential, fictional user with precise characteristics: a first name, age, gender, marital status, socio-professional category, place of residence, interests, beliefs, preferred communication channels, etc. The more precise you are, the easier it will be to continue with the next four phases after empathy.

Once these three sub-steps of empathy have been completed, the definition phase begins. The objective: formalize needs that individuals are not always aware of, in order to refine the target and define an overall problem statement. See you in the second phase!