 So I'm the creative lead in the digital customer experience team at A&Z, a bank in Australia. We also have some of our designers working in Bangalore. So it's great for me to get to hang out with them while I'm here. So, kudos to you guys. Hi. So, oh gosh, that's better. So, I've got a lot to get through today, not a lot of times. So I'm just going to jump straight into things. And open up my talk. Okay, great. So basically what I'd like to talk about today is how designing, making, creating from the heart from a place where you feel something for someone else is really powerful and can help you innovate in your worlds and help you fill out the full picture. So I know we've heard a lot from a lot of amazing speakers over the last few days. And one of the big themes that I've picked up on is something that's really key to me and something that I really want to focus on. And I think that's what we all understand to be the most important part of user experience. And that is our next, the drama. Okay, maybe I'll get this guy. People, yay. So, people are really the most important thing because that's who we're designing for, that's why we do what we do. We don't really do it for a lot of other reasons if we're doing it for the right reasons and we're doing it from our heart. So, what's really important is to understand people and to understand them not just at a shallow level but to understand them at a deep level because we're more than just like one-dimensional creatures. We're very complex. And for those of you who were in my workshop yesterday I understand that I got you to dig pretty deep and to almost a confronting place before you get to know each other on that kind of level. So, people are a lot. They're a lot of things. They're all these things. They're inspired, hopeful, desperate, dissatisfied, complex and amazing at the same time. And how I like to think of that is that they're actually whole people not just one-dimensional people. And the thing that's important about understanding how to design for whole people is that we're designing for whole experiences at the same time and that's really what we design for. So, how do we understand people holistically? So, I'm proposing today that empathy is the key to understanding people holistically because it's a way that we can understand them in multiple levels. So, what I'm going to let you experience is what I believe empathy can do, which is to help you, to help your practice, to help your products, to help your users, your business, your organizations and your societies and possibly the world. So, empathy occurs, as Simon Baron Cohen said, empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus and attention and adopt a double-minded focus of attention. And what that means, those of you in my workshop yesterday will have heard this before, but what that means is that we're designing for two types of empathy, not just a single type of empathy and there are some differences between the two. So, cognitive empathy is what we generally use and that's the kind of empathy where we can understand how someone else is thinking and feeling because we've probably been in a similar situation or we've felt that way one time before. We can understand that cognitively. Emotional empathy is actually when you feel what someone else is feeling. It's a very different thing and together they complete the picture of empathy. So, here's a bit about the brain. I am no cognitive scientist, so this is an abstracted and very simplified version of how the brain works, but there are three parts of the brain. There's the reptilian brain that controls like a heart, a breathing, all that sort of stuff. It's actually where fear is stored as well, which is kind of interesting. Then there's the neocortex and that's what separates us from a lot of the animal kingdom. They have like quite thin neocortexes where ours is really thick and this is our analytical thinking, our ability to like abstract thought, use symbolism, remember languages, all that kind of stuff that sets us apart. Then what we share with the rest of the animal kingdom is our limbic system and that's the part of our brain that has our memory and it's a mixture of a lot of chemical processes and it also stores our empathy, our base empathy. So lots of animals feel this kind of empathy too. So what we need to understand is that we're merging these two types of empathy together to understand a whole person and to be the most effective. So in terms of what we use cognitive empathy to do, that's to create maps. We're very good at creating maps, abstracting things in a way that can help us understand things more holistically and better design for them and the kinds of designs result from understanding things and these levels are very logical and very sensible and very usable and probably really great designs. We use empathy maps, we understand emotions in lots of ways and people try to just make meaning and understand the world in these ways so this is how we normally work but emotional empathy is more about understanding the territory. So you've got your map and then you've got your actual territory which is the world that you actually experience. So it's different. So just for a few seconds let's look at these people and see how they're feeling. Do you feel a bit more connected to them than they did the maps emotionally? Possibly? Obviously they're just photos but that's what connecting deeply and empathically on that emotional level is all about. So now I'd like to have a little look at back to cognitive empathy and what motivates people because understanding what motivates people is a way for us to really understand them at a deep level. So we can use our cognitive empathy to understand people at a shallow level but it's really important to get deep to really understand. So according to self-determination theory, there are lots of theories but this one's an interesting one, we're motivated to feel pretty much two things, well-being and a sense of thriving. That's our ambition to do well at work, all of our focus on feeling good in our lives and feeling like we're actually thriving and working well. So there are three aspects to that, there are the psychological needs and I won't go into this list but this is a list that's being put together by a number of researchers, Sheldon is one and what's interesting is over the last 15 years of the research those top three things consistently stay in the top three positions because some reason we're really motivated psychologically to be autonomous and be authentic, to be related to and connected with others and to be competent and effective. The others are really important as well but they're really key, three really key ones. So the other thing that's tied to motivation are our values and our goals basically how we see the world, what we value and we're motivated by personal intrinsic goals and values and these are things like personal growth, love, helping others, etc and we're also motivated by extrinsic goals so what our society puts upon us like affluence, beauty, status, power, etc and we're also motivated to behave in a certain way to feel how it feels to behave in a certain way because it's enjoyable or interesting or that it reinforces our sense of selves and we're also motivated by our society to behave in a certain way and that's often guilt or fear or pressure or wanting to please other people so we're motivated by all these things as well so the way that I see it is that these are the sorts of things that we need to consider when we're trying to understand someone at a deep level and trying to understand what motivates them and if we understand those as a framework we can then build on that by understanding how those universals can then vary and be specific to people when we move into thinking about them as an individual and thinking about how they're affected by their society and their culture and how they're affected by the situation that they're in how does that change things so I consider this to be the whole person when we're thinking about someone at multiple levels we think about them at these levels and we don't just think about them we put ourselves in situations where we can understand these things and be exposed to their perspectives on these things so we can feel them as well so I guess what I'm trying to say is that we should move away from thinking about just designing user experiences to designing human experiences because we're not just users we're more than that we're more than just users even when we're using a product so raising our perspective often changing our perspective is going to help us understand more opportunities in how things work so how can empathy power innovation? so there's a lot changing in the world and I've picked two theories that exemplify this and some other people have mentioned them over the last three days so I think it's a good kind of follow-up on that so there are two theories that expose different ways for us to work in the world and different ways for us to value things so let's look at what we value first so a number of people have spoken about the experience economy and so you probably have a fair idea about what this is but what's interesting about this is that this is now about what we value as societies and so we're starting to value experiences much more but what's even more interesting is that we're actually starting to value the transformation that experience can give us even more so we're looking for things to change us to make us better people to give us a sense of growth and progress and Pine and Gilmore who developed this theory they say that businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers and that memory itself becomes the product the experience offer is transformation and Brian Chesney Airbnb CEO said that he echoes this and saying that he would much prefer to build something that 100 people love so that's that transformative like rich deep appreciation of something rather than you know something that a million people kind of like and even Airbnb is actually putting that out into the world now so they've developed a whole new side to their business where they're actually selling experiences so you can have an experience that someone else is going to give you so it's a clear indication this is the direction we're heading in and John Colco said in his recent book on empathy that modern startups like Airbnb and Nest have proven that industry disruption is possible not by adding features or getting people to buy more but by focusing instead on providing deep meaningful engagement to people who use these products and services so under these important in this context because it's a natural way that someone that we can understand someone well enough to be able to understand what could be transformative to them so let's look at how we work and the changes there so this is the conceptual age so this is a theory introduced by Daniel Pink and a whole new world in 2005 again echoing the same transformation in our society as we move from agricultural to industrial to information age and now into conceptual age and what's interesting about this and about how this affects how we work is that it produces office spaces like this places that are much more aligned to supporting these kinds of goals in the way that we work so society and businesses are now valuing design a lot more valuing story, valuing symphony, empathy, play and meaning wait, wait take some photos so how we work and what we value is essentially transforming this creative empathic people creating transformative experiences so that's like this new world that we're kind of heading into so let's innovate to support not only what's useful what's also valuable and meaningful to people in this new age and I think it's actually time for us in UX because over the last 20 odd years we've done pretty amazing work understanding how to build patterns that are great for cognition really fast for task completion they enable us to understand how people think and how people digest information really well so I think we've done so much on that level but it's now time for us to add this additional dimension into our work so how? so basically use empathy to empower you empower yourselves to create better designs as I said before to create richer and more holistic human experiences better business outcomes too it actually like adds up in the end and more caring and empowered organizations and societies so let's start with you so there are five key reasons I think that you should use empathy, there are probably more so like shout them out if you can think of them empathy surfaces latent needs so having empathy for someone allows you to see them in a different way and see aspects of them or the process that you use to gain empathy can help you understand what they really need maybe even beyond what they say they need and it's deep it's going to be like something you can really connect with on a deep level and feel more fulfilled by understanding and it'll make you care more because basically if you understand someone and empathize with them you'll care more and also and it'll lead to intuition you'll be able to work out what's the best for them and it'll make you nimble so Steve Jobs and Aiko Morita of Sony didn't do much market research when they were in their roles but they instead did a lot of walking around watching people putting themselves in other people's shoes because at the end of the day you need to espouse this feeling that comes from your gut it's about people connecting with you on that level so I pulled this together about looking for empathy at different depths so you can get empathy at all these levels but certain activities are going to get you deeper empathy than other activities so it's really important all this stuff's important behavioral data, super important demographics, super important because you can see how people are behaving and how people are behaving in smaller groups personas are great because they help you aggregate a lot of people into a single outlook design testing, usability testing etc is fantastic, very task focused and design focused but it's really great but then the final four which are contextual inquiry listening to stories, co-designing etc there are more in this category but these ones are the ones that are going to build that more emotional empathy because they're the ones that are going to connect you with actual people so if you connect with actual people you're going to start building that empathy so there are really as I see it's five key ways to gain empathy there are stories, observation discussions and conversations visual response and co-design and I won't go into much detail if you want any more detail I've got some slides on this in detail but in just a time I'll skip past this but this is a really five important ways you can gain empathy for people so one way I do want to share with you today is a way that I it's a project that I worked on five years ago I thought it would be cool to show some other work but a lot of that is under NDA so I can't really show you that stuff so this is for me so I can show you this stuff and to echo some of the sentiments earlier around showing case studies so what I did was I designed for I was very curious about understanding how to design for emotional richness and depth so instead of designing for a lot of people what's going to be like to design for just a few people and see what happens there so I designed for museums learning experiences in museums on mobile phones and meet Alice so Alice is one of my generous participants who gave me her time and to thank her for giving me her time I designed for her a beautiful kit I called it an Insights Kit it's essentially like a stimulus stimuli kit and I produced this for her and sent it I was in New York she was in Australia and she spent two weeks completing it before sending it back to me but it was designed in a very specific way to get sort of rich deep meaningful content that's kind of holistic so how it was designed was to get her sense of self her feelings, her experiences her opinions and her emotions so the first thing was what I called an album and it was essentially like a biography of her so I asked her to tell me about herself so those of you in my workshop would have gone through this yesterday a shortened version of this where she was able to express herself in her own natural way so some people did collage, montage they put tickets that they had captured in there and they created these very rich and visual like responses to this activity the next activity was a diary so this was where she documented her life for those two weeks so like a diary study very similar but in a very tactile way and the third thing were a series of postcards that had very specific questions on them tied to the specific context that we were working so tied to learning so and tied to to mobile technology and gameplay and things that were really important to her so I asked her things like tell me a story that's changed your life how do you learn and what's your most valuable skill etc and I also asked for themes, emotional themes cultural themes and a number of other themes that could tell me a bit more about what she believed and what her values were and then I said here's a notebook when you go to the museum I asked them what to go to the museum for me and have an experience and record it so when she went to the museum I said any ideas you have or any ideas you have after you go just jot them down put them on this notebook and send them back so she went to the museum and used the iPod touch that I also included and she went there and recorded everything photos, videos etc and then anytime she felt anything she could use an emotion sticker to stick on something so I can't really show you all of the stuff because I said that I'd keep it private but it was amazing it was incredible to get immersed in this to try to understand someone better and doing it remotely was definitely an interesting experience as well so then we like connected and talked about ideas and I transcribed the ideas and noticed a lot about her values and a lot about what mattered in her life and then summarized them and came up with a proposal, we worked on it together and we decided that she was going to focus on memories in museums and how to build memories and store them and then how to share those memories and how to deal with kind of virtual objects and physical objects so I did some sketching came up with some ideas, shared them with her we decided to move in a certain direction and then I finally created the design and shared that with her and put it together that was really the end of the experience but more than the design or the process, what was really important was what I learned when I heard back from these people and what I learned from understanding what they felt in total so she felt she had a greater connection to all these histories in her environment she felt she had a greater connection with what's on a pedestal in an exhibition and what's hidden in the vaults because it pulled up a lot of the archival stuff and she just loved loved it, so she said she loved it and that was an amazing thing to hear back from someone and that's essentially what we're aiming for with our designs so when I look at products and how we can innovate products having, creating a product that has a personality or even a soul and making it more like a friend is incredibly valuable to people you might think that this doesn't make sense for you know software in a business place but it does because we're all humans and we all want to feel a certain way and we all want to connect with people so I did that process for three people and created three different applications and for Alice, Lexie and Sarah what was interesting about that is that they all actually had the same features and functions they're all the same strangely enough they all kind of wanted to do the same sort of stuff and so this is what we probably would aggregate from doing a lot of research for people but what was interesting is that even though they wanted to capture objects navigate an orient filter read information share with and hear from other people they all wanted to do these same things and none of them wanted the mobile device to be the entire experience they all wanted it to be an augmented experience on top of going to a museum but what was so interesting is that what I realized is that going through that process for me is the awareness that the design that the application had to have a purpose it had to be built around something that was meaningful to these people and it had to have emotional and cultural value to these people it had to have a viewpoint and a character and that viewpoint and character came out through the process of me getting to know these people better which was an amazing experience so they all had the same features they had a few additional features that supported the concept but the concept behind each of these was different so behind the application threads for Alice it was about learning that we are responsible for preserving our culture and then the design for Sarah was learning that we are more connected than we may think and the design for Sarah was to remind ourselves how important and rewarding giving can be and I don't have time to explain how these were set up but I can definitely chat with you later if you're interested so that was a process that led to an understanding of richer and more holistic human experiences through design and obviously you're probably saying well how can we do that we have to design certain product but I think there is potential to go through a process like that and start to see how the group of people as a larger group whether their values are similar and whether you can actually align to a certain larger societal group of values and then try to infuse that purpose that character and that cultural meaning into the designs so the other thing about empathy is that the more you know what's about the more you know about people the more you feel about people the less experience waste you'll be creating we can create a lot of waste just by having stuff out there that's not actually that valuable to people all there are processes that are just maybe too complicated or you're forced into having to do but think about Anticipatory Design it's a new thing coming up and how you can be relevant to people don't waste their time and how you can be resonant to people give them a sense that it's tied to them it's meaningful to them and that it's a motive and that it's tied to their values and that it's meaningful to them so make more empathic human connections by focusing on human problems leading to human value outcomes and the more you focus on the human problems the more your designs will contain human value outcomes and the more you'll think in a different way about them so the other thing is I said in all contexts so with the workplace changing we can even think about how designing software that's very task oriented might be too closed a focus why don't we open the focus up and think about maybe how the software could change to integrate with a new way of working so how about we work with companies to try to understand that level of human experience as well so how can empathy help your business well it can help your business based on one really true true fact is that people are willing to pay premium prices to get products and services that connect with them things that are meaningful to them and people want to make connections with the folks they do business with so having that empathy for your customer and having it come through the product is just a good business decision and how can it help your organization this is a really important one because you probably all know this companies have become quite disconnected from their customers and they use figures like 62% of urban mothers have positive impressions of the brand yay but they're not really uncovering the deeper ideas there the deeper sentiments what's also interesting is that you've seen that organizations might be changing but they're changing from a type of organization that has not been around for a very long time before the industrial revolution business was all about personal relationships and I've seen here in India that it still is in a lot of ways the service culture is really still alive and fresh and well in Bangalore and India so I think that's fantastic, don't lose that because it's about how we really connect as people and you don't want to get to a place where it's you're too disconnected and your customers will act differently towards you if they see you as real people not as just a company so caring about them helps them see you as real people and start to leverage how human beings are biologically wired because as I said earlier our brains work in a certain way that's just how we work so help people gain empathy help them make connections with other people and see how that's going to improve their experience because if people are engaged their productivity skyrockets so just get them engaged and the best innovation comes from the heart and not the head so I did want to tell a story I don't know how much time I've got left if any, 5 minutes? I'll tell this story really quickly so that guy Gary Hamill was talking about a story he wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review a few months ago about his brother he's a CEO at a hospital when he arrived at the hospital new CEO also a doctor he discovered that their satisfaction scores were like 25% and then he looked at all of the other ratings you know how people liked the food how people thought the service was and that was on par with all the other hospitals in the region but for some reason their satisfaction scores were like so low so he didn't know why so he took all his employees away to an offsite and decided that he was going to make them learn how to be more loving and to make them know that they're not only caring well for people but they're showing people how much they care about them so he took everyone away and he told them that over the next three months he would make sure that they gave him examples of how much they're helping and how much they're caring so he tracked around the basically all the hospital floors and would constantly ask people what impact have you had on the patients today you know what caring act have you done today and so that changed the culture and then one day a man came into the hospital and he he came in with his wife and she was really really sick feeling awful and he didn't know what was wrong and he discovered that she had cancer and that she actually probably wouldn't survive the night and he was like at his wit's end he was just angry and upset and there were security guards who were about to like call the cops and arrest him but then a nurse saw him in this state and she went up to him and she said would you like a hug so she gave him a hug and he cried in the shoulder for about 20 minutes and felt better and it's that example of caring and having empathy for people that can really change things in that organization and I think their satisfaction scores went up as a result because they showed people how they really cared and they were going from the heart you have to really care for people you have to really care for them at a deep level so change what's valued in the organization and make empathy a priority and make everyone care