All things in UX design revolve around the user experience, hence the name. Products whether digital or physical should start by putting yourself in the users shoes, which is the best way to create great user experiences. When you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you empathize with your users. The definition of empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation.
Empathizing with users will make you a better all around UX designer. The reason for this is because once you put yourself in their shoes, you will immediately be anticipating a user’s desires and needs. If users feel comfortable with the product, they will tend to stick around long-term engaging with the product. Emphasize, emphasize, emphasize.
Below are tips that you can use to help better understand and empathize with your users:
Ask questions… lots of questions
Making assumptions is the worst thing you can do when trying to answer user needs. Focus on asking the users questions first to help better understand their needs and what they are looking for in future product deployments.
Take time to observe
If you are conducting research with the user physically with you or if you can see them in video, watch their body language and not just their words. Physical cues can help better understand certain needs when observed correctly.
Actively listen
Allow the users to fully vent to you. Try not to take negative feedback in a way where you get emotional because they are criticizing your work. If you allow your emotions to get to you, you might interrupt the users from fully explaining their point of views, which will lead to you not obtaining fully transparent feedback.
Be open minded
When conducting research, your goal should be to understand the users and not let biases get in the way. Although we all do have biases, we need to learn to set those aside when doing research to better empathize with others. Having an open mind will allow you to open up and see the world from many different point of views.