 I am Jarad, I am accountable for the user experience of Calidus Cloud Marketing Automation Platform. What we are going to look at today is, emphatic testing, the context of design thinking. So, before we get into that I want you to take a moment and look into an incident in your life, where you were really trying to communicate something to someone and that communication was, and the other person could just not get your communication or could not get how you felt, right? So, could you just take a couple of minutes to think about that incident in your life? Okay. Great. So, I want you to keep this incident in mind as we go through this presentation, okay? Yeah. So, often what happens is that we are talking about empathy in design thinking, but empathy is very different from sympathy, right? And it is very important to distinguish these two first, right? Now, empathy is feeling for someone. It is a feeling of pity for someone else's misfortune, right? It is something like, if someone says, I have lost my dream job, you just say that I am sorry to hear about that, right? It does not require us to have any emotional connect with the person who is sharing, right? Whereas an empathic response would be more like, I am sorry to hear that. I understand that you really love the job and it must be heartbreaking. You want to talk more about it, okay? So, empathy is feeling as someone and it is really the world ability to understand someone else's feeling, right? By placing yourself in that person's shoes and looking at the world through their eyes, right? I wanted to show this small video that was produced by RSA Shots on the difference between empathy and sympathy. So, what is empathy and why is it very different from sympathy? Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Weizmann is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective taking, the ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth, staying out of judgment, not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do, recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that. Empathy is feeling with people. And to me, I always think that empathy is this kind of sacred space where someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck, it's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then, we look and we say, hey, calm down, I know what it's like down here and you're not alone. Sympathy is, it's bad, uh-huh? Uh, no, you want to see much? Um, empathy is a choice and it's a vulnerable choice because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling rarely if ever because an empathic response begin with at least. I had a, yeah. And we do it all the time because you know what, someone just shared something with us, it's incredibly painful and we're trying to silver line the mix. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver line around it, so I had a miscarriage. At least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage. John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an A student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now, I'm just surprised you told me. Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection. So what we're looking into right now is empathy. So as we all know that design thinking starts with empathy, it's one of the core principles of design thinking. And why is it important to have empathy to design? Now in most instances we really don't know who our users are. And to know, and to design for someone we don't know, we need to know who they are, what they are up to, and what matters to them the most. And for that we need to create empathy. Now in design thinking there are a couple of ways where you create empathy and empathy is the first step in design thinking. So we use observing or engaging with the users to create that kind of empathy. So when we are engaging and observing with users, we get insights into what matters to them. And these insights give us a direction into creating innovative solutions. And one important factor that you can call it a factor that we use empathy listening during these two phases, like observing and engaging, to create these insights. But here's the thing, when we're listening, or when we're observing or engaging, we listen to our users. But the thing is, as designers, we don't get present to these insights because we don't listen. And it's just not about designers. As humans we don't listen. We are born with the ability to hear but not to listen. And for that we need to get trained. Now according to research 75% of a day we spend communicating. And 45% of the day we are listening. But the thing with listening here is, we don't just listen when someone talks. We are always listening through opinions that keep forming in our mind. So what are these opinions? These opinions are about whether that conversation is right or wrong, whether it should or should not have happened, whether it's invalidating, or whether it's good or bad. But the thing is we can't do anything about it. As humans we are non-stop forming these opinions at every conversation at every point of time in our life. And we can't do anything about it. But what we can do is to be present with these opinions and just letting it go. Now this is how our responses would be if we don't have empathy. Our responses will be to judge. We start changing the subject in our conversation. We start to advise. We will question your authenticity. Do you really mean what you are saying? Then we start assuring without basis. We start doing psychoanalysis of the conversation. And we start to tell our own story. It happens a lot during user research. I have been part of user research where they are asking me questions but they are giving the answers for me. And you just can't find any insight if you want to have that kind of a conversation so soon. And I know better. Now there are steps like I said for listening we need to get trained in it. And these are few steps that you could use to get trained. The first one is you have to have the willingness to really want to know the person. Now without that willingness you cannot create any empathy by listening. Now this is not like a linear process that you do this, next, next, next. It's not like that. In a conversation you are present to the kind of opinions that are getting formed. So when you get present to these are opinions that are forming and judging this person. Let me drop that. Let me listen to what really that person is feeling. The second is to be present to your opinions about what the other person is feeling and just letting it go. The third is to consider the emotional state of that person. What happens is humans lose out in communicating the feelings. They might say a lot of things, like a lot of words but the feeling is something that always misses out from communication. Either from the person of saying or the way we listen. Like a person would be really yelling but we won't get what they are feeling. We will be stuck in our own conversation saying that that person is yelling and happens a lot in our relationships. The fourth is listening carefully for the verbal and non-verbal message. One of the things when I was designing a user interface I was getting some user tests done and this lady was giving me feedback on the UI and saying that this works, this doesn't work I wasn't happy with a few features and that was good. I got all the information that I wanted to but I was too busy writing those notes and capturing whatever she's saying and I looked up and I saw her, she was testing the UI and I saw her, her face was showing a lot of frustration working on the UI and that kind of really bothered me. I was like this is not the kind of expression I want my users to be having while working on my product. Then I inquired more into what's happening, why are you looking so frustrated? When I inquired further on, I actually got way more insights and future updates into what she actually wants. Whatever was there was great but what she really wants was not what I was doing. These are few steps that you could implement. Like I said it's not like linear but you have to in a conversation keep seeing what works and what doesn't work in the conversation. The point is to actually listen to them and create an empathy to be able to feel and feel what they think, say and do. I actually had a practice but since there's no time I think I'm going to skip that but I came across this Mandarin character. This is the character for listen in Mandarin. It has four components, the ears, eyes, attention and an open heart. What this essentially means is this is a Chinese translation for the word to listen which is I give you my ears, my eyes, my full attention and my open heart and this pretty much sums up what listening is and it's like the best definition I've ever heard. Do we have time for a practice? It's a quick one. Another very few but could you just choose a partner please? We just do this very quickly so that we can at least I'll leave you with something to take away from this. Choose A and B and I want A to share with B. Your experience in this conference till now and B I don't want you to do anything. I just want you to get present to the opinions that are getting formed while A is sharing with you. And if possible drop that and listen to what A is feeling right now. Please start. If A is done now we can share and we can listen. Why are you cracking up? Okay so how many of you guys could actually get present to the opinions that you were forming while the other person was talking? But don't be shy everyone does that. I'm expecting all the hands to go up. Otherwise I'm coming to get some training from you guys. There's nothing wrong. This is just a starting point. Like I said it's not like I figured it out so it's done. You need to have ongoing practice day in and day out with every person you meet in your life. It's just not empathy. It's just not about the kind of designs that we are doing or having the client meetings or whatever. It's creating empathy at every point in your life with everyone that you touch. Thanks for listening.