Have we lost our way with Empathize Methods

Have we lost our way with Empathize Methods?

I am not saying these methods are not useful, because they are.

However in past work it seemed that someone would jump in and put ourselves in the "shoes" of the customers or employees to capture thoughts, feelings, motivations emotions in a workshop or other activity.

We would take data like

Customer 1 said: "I don't know how to do this"

The team would immediately assumed the customer was having a capability issue and would suggest building a tutorials.

However, if we go deeper - and used a behavioral focus - we would when get more context and realize that what they mean is that the customer didn't believe they could do the behavior or action - which means it is not really a capability issues, but rather something to do with beliefs, which requires a different solution.

See, when you are talking about behaviors and drivers of behavior few teams are applying a systematic, evidence-based approach - nor any models or theories as a basis for understanding better what these things you captured in your empathize methods really mean for meeting a need.

There is no set of strategies or guaranteed tactics that always work when it comes to change, what you need to learn is to be a better critical thinker and to equip yourself with the thinking tools of behavior, so you can draw from them when you need them.

So you can form a better hypothesis to test

We need to stop confirming to ourselves that we know what is best for the user ( yes, I have had people tell me those exact words) from our gut feeling and memory - and instead use a systematic approach, so we can know what we did and where we may have gone wrong.

Please let me know how you use empathy in your design.

Image credit - Interaction Design Foundation

I am not saying these methods are not useful, because they are.