Design With Empathy

We do a lot of talking and writing about design at Kindling's parent company, Arc90. It's the reason we're in business and what we love to do - we bring a design mentality to all of our work, be that side projects, client consulting work or our products.

In this post I'll avoid the deep pool that is the discussion about design in general, but let me put forward one facet of design - design as a manifestation of empathy for users. Putting oneself into the perspective of the users of your product is a powerful thing, and can quickly illuminate usability, product, messaging, tone, and a host of other issues. We design Kindling with great empathy for our users. We're critical of every proposed feature that we're considering adding to the product, and ask ourselves if the new feature will present a barrier for the user. If it does, it has to deliver immense value to compensate for that loss. Features that complicate the experience without sufficient payoff will never make the cut.

Take a look at our idea page - hours of design thinking, prototyping and tweaking went into this single page. Everything from what features and options are present (and importantly which are not), to the language used, to the URL structure, to the interactions has been designed with the user in mind. There are no mysteries on this page - no cognitive load for the user to overcome. We often hear how well-designed and simple Kindling is, and that's no accident.

As mentioned above, another aspect of design as empathy is being critical of features that make it into the product. Many of our competitors market their product as a vast collection of features. Blog? check. Wikis? check. Tag clouds? check. Stock market for idea valuation? check. Voting, rating, and reviewing? check. Social media sharing? check. Insert other Web 2.0 buzzword here? check! But a well-designed product is not a collection of features - it's a specific set of capabilities meant to achieve a planned purpose - a goal. Features are a handy sales tool, but often get in the way of real usage.

Here's a screen shot from one of our well-regarded competitors. It's the same type of page as the one you just looked at above - an idea view. But try launching both of our idea views into your browser. Now put yourself into the perspective of a user of this system, maybe a nurse in a hospital or a marketing manager. Can you see the difference?

I'll leave the majority of this exercise to you. Obviously there are many differences between the two products, but I'd like to point to a small detail - in Kindling an idea has a description. I'm sure you had no problem locating it, as it's been designed to be part and parcel of the idea itself. In this competing tool, their ideas have descriptions too. Can you find it? Keep looking - it's called "StockSummary". What a powerful example of how verbiage can be just as important as aesthetics in design. And what an example of the power of empathy in design - for one would never call an idea description anything but that if you are actively considering how your product will be used.

This process of imagining yourself as the user - a nurse or marketing manager - is a process of design, and more broadly a process of empathy. It's a wonderful tool - one that can differentiate your product from the competition.