Page 80 - The Design Thinking Playbook
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KEY LEARNINGS
Build empathy with the user
• Build empathy by understanding the actual needs and backgrounds of potential users.
• Observe potential users without prejudice and in their actual environment.
• Act like an extraterrestrial being who has entered a new galaxy for the first time.
• Improve empathy by perceiving your own wishes, which in turn makes you more open to the needs of others.
• Listening carefully is a crucial component of empathy. Pay attention to the body language (nonverbal communication) and probe if
it seems to contradict what has been said.
• Transfer emotions about contents from the digital world to reality by emoticons.
• Draw conclusions from variations of the emoticons about users, their behavior, and their emotional relationship to content,
products, and services.
• Enhance user experience—even of a digital product—through the empathy you have built up.
• Make sure that all parties involved in the development phase (e.g., UX) are already dealing actively with users’ wishes.
• Pay heed to the cultural context in UX because it can strongly affect how the user perceives the offer.
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