The significance of empathizing with the user.

In Design Thinking, empathy is the key to everything, is putting ourselves in other people’s shoes; this means, living the experience and thus understanding reality from the user’s point of view, to deeply know the needs of users or customers, and thus be able to identify and easily understand what they want, think, need and ask. Based on this, we focus on empathy to offer solutions and develop new ideas to satisfy the customer. Most likely, if done well, we can achieve optimal and concrete results and find solutions to complex issues.

The first stage of any process in Design Thinking is empathizing. As mentioned, this is a user-based innovative tool used to offer solutions to people’s specific wishes or needs. When designing for others, the first step should be to put ourselves in their shoes in order to understand what they consider really important. Thus, the more we are able to put ourselves in the users’ positions, the easier it will be for us to understand them and identify what can genuinely generate a positive experience for them.

Design Thinking processes are designed to be carried out in an agile way; however, it is important to dedicate some time to work in this process step. If we haven’t got enough information about our user, it will be difficult to find solutions connected to their needs and desires. In that case, most likely, we will have to invest time to perform this step again sooner or later.