User experience, at its best, is about empathy with the people who use the products and services we design. We are asked to understand the user perspectives and what they need to have satisfying and successful experiences. We are called upon to be user advocates. We generally acknowledge the importance of understanding our users' points of view. Why, then, are we so generally bad at empathy? This short spotlight talk shares my personal journey (so far) in trying to answer that question and to find ways to improve my own empathy.

1. A Remedial Course in
Empathy
Karen L Bachmann
@karenbachmann #stc14

2. “I think you all really care a lot about
empathy. I think you all really know that
it’s important. I just don’t think you are
always very good at it.”
~ Karen McGrane
IA Summit 2013 Closing Plenary
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2013/10/18/ia-summit-2013-karen-mcgranes-closing-plenary/
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3. WHY?
WHY?
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4.  Sympathy
 Pity
 Kindness
 Happy for
 Any emotional reaction to
someone’s situation
What empathy is not...
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5.  GreaterGood: Ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled
with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking
or feeling.
 Merriam-Webster: the feeling that you understand and share
another person's experiences and emotions; the ability to share
someone else's feelings
What is empathy?
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6.  Affective empathy: sensations and feelings we get in response to
others’ emotions
 Cognitive empathy: ability to identify and understand other
peoples’ emotions
 Emotional intelligence: the ability to monitor one's own and
other people's emotions
Variations on a theme
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7. A mindful, intellectual process for
sharing an emotional connection
with another person
My working definition of empathy

8. Biologically wired to care
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Limbic System by Bruce Blaus (Wikimedia Commons)

9. Feeling vs. Thinking
Where did we go wrong?
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10. Scalability of empathy
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11. Scalability of empathy
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12. Why are we like this?
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13. Data > People
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14. Business vs. Empathy
“But you were always a good man of business,
Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to
apply this to himself.
‘Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands
again. “Mankind was my business; charity,
mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all
my business. The deals of my trade were but a
drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of
my business!”
~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XNKe1cGucY 18:26
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15. A remedial course
“Empathy is intuitive, but is also something
you can work on, intellectually.”
~Tim Minchin
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16.  Innovation and creativity emerges from caring about people
facing problems
 Empathy is critical to economic innovation
 Trust economy is about people
 Sharing economy is about trust
 Communication is harder and more critical than ever and
empathy builds connections
Why do we need to
return to empathy?
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17. Wired: A related example
How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other
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18.  Change our language
 Use the language of people we engage with
 Take care of the people you engage with in how we talk to
them and of them
 Change our approaches
 Spend time really immersed in the “problem space”
 Change ourselves
 Practice empathy
How?
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19.  Users, certainly
 Teams and collaborators
 Partners and extended
teams
 Peers and colleagues
 Everyone?
Mankind is my business
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“I believe empathy is
the most essential
quality of civilization.”
~ Robert Ebert

20.  Actively listen, don’t judge
 Read stories, real stories, of people you engage with
 Expose yourself to more people regularly – be curious
 Model, mirror, imagine
 Be mindful and correct yourself, but don’t recriminate
What we can do
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21. So let’s connect:
@karenbachmann
www.linkedin.com/pub/karen-bachmann/4/a/884/
“Ten years from now many of the information you learn at
the conference will be out of date, the only thing will last is
the relationship you build today.” ~ Cam Mi Pham
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22.  http://www.freeimages.com/photo/948501
 http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1079133
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blausen_0614_LimbicSystem.png#fi
lelinks
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indig1.jpg
 https://www.flickr.com/photos/globalcitizen01/5908582098/sizes/
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sanzio_01_Plato_Aristotle.jpg
 http://www.datanami.com/2014/01/10/universities_roll_out_new_big
_data_programs/
Image credits
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23.  Chimamanda Adichie, Single Story
 Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, How to Build a Culture of Empathy?
 Bobby K. Cheon, Vani A. Mathur, Joan Y. Chiao, Empathy as cultural process:
insights from the cultural neuroscience of empathy
 Kevin Dulle, Apathy to Empathy: A Business Shift
 Will Evans, Design Ethnography for Lean Teams
 Greater Good: Empathy
 Robert Lee Hotz, Tracing the Origins of Human Empathy
 Megan Kapera, Why Empathy is Good Business
 Roman Krznaric on Greater Good, Six habits of highly empathetic people
Readings
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Unlike most references in a slide deck, this list is not citations as much as some of the resources
that I’ve found interesting and useful at this point in my personal journey with developing
empathy. I hope that you find them helpful in your own journey.

24.  Selwa Luke, How To Care: Three Empathy Building Exercises For Work And Home
 Karen McGrane, IA Summit 2013 Closing Plenary: Slides and Audio
 Don Norman, Error Messages are Evil
 Dev Patnaik, Innovation Starts with Empathy
 Jeremy Rifkin, ‘The Empathic Civilization’: Rethinking Human Nature in the
Biosphere Era
 Skills you need: What is empathy?
 Jason Tanz, How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other
 Reading to come: Indi Young, Practical Empathy
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Readings