Empathy Week
This week is the beginning of a case study, where I will interview people and also give them a probing kit. Let’s start with the basics.
What is Empathy?
In order to do justice in explaining this I created a audio only story to share my understanding.
Empathy drives connection while sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy makes other person feel you are not alone. It’s making yourself vulnerable.
Last week I listed down people I will be interviewing and I called them up yesterday and fixed a time with them.
The Primary goal for this week is interview 4-5 people and document the interview as well. In case you have missed my previous post this activity is done as a part of a case study. The Case study is part of IDF design thinking curriculum.
Design Thinking Project
Task : Create a smartphone app which will help people improve their fitness.
Case Study : People who want to become fit but are not able to exercise enough.
Target Group : Parents with kids under 7 year old.
Why this target group : Children’s below 7 are not independent and require lot of hand holding. Due to which parents are not able to take out time.
Conducting Interviews
Here is the guidance I received from IDF to conduct the interview:
- Why your participants want to exercise;
- What concretely happens when they do manage to exercise;
- What concretely happens when something prevents them from exercising.
User Interview’s purpose :
- To find out about participants habit and motivation.
Suggested Questions
- How and where they exercise.
- Whats happens when they don’t exercise.
- Why they want to exercise more.
Empathetic Approach to Interview
- Ask why even if you know the answer.
- Dont ask judgemental questions - “Do you think its difficult to manage time?” instead of this ask : “What do you think why time management is so difficult?”
- Listen to there stories.
I also came up with following questions:
- What are the obstructions you see in creating daily exercise routine?
- Ask candidates about there family members, who are they what they do?
- What kind of work you do?
- Do you suffer from any Illness?
- Do you follow any diet?
- What is there favourite activity for exercising?
- Do they use any fitness app or activity tracker?
PROBES FOR CONTEXT MAPPING
I read about Context mapping, I will share what I can understand. It is a technique to get deeper understanding about what users knows, feel and dream.
The first step is to determine goals followed by developing probing kit. In our case the goal is to make people exercise.
The idea behind probing kit is to get participants in right mindset and have them reflect on their lives.
I guess this is tricky and without trying I will not understand. As per IDF curriculum they have listed following probes:
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Timeline of typical day
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Take pictures of something that helps them exercise.
Another probe that I want to add is :
- Take pictures of what they are eating.
If probing kit is about getting participants in right mindset than I can even ask them to create a “Stop Doing list”, this may help in figuring out things they are doing unconsciosly and can self correct.
- Create Stop Doing list
Here is the probing kit in right order:
- Timeline of typical day
- Create Stop Doing list
- Take pictures of something that helps them exercise.
- Take pictures of what they are eating.
UPDATE - November 7 : I spent some more time understanding empathy. Some of the leanings from empathy can be straight away applied to interview process. To begin an interview start a personal fact or story about yourself, share something that you are not comfortable with. Once we make ourselves vulnerable it may serve as an icebreaker. Due to which other person will open up and share facts that they wont easily share. I have updated question list above.
References:
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Empathetic approach for interviewing - Download the template from this link.
TIP : Follow the link above to download full design thinking bundle.