How can you develop empathy in your IA career?

Immerse yourself in the user's perspective. Actively engage in user research, conduct interviews, and observe real interactions to understand their needs deeply. Create user personas that embody diverse characteristics and motivations, enabling you to design with empathy for various user experiences. Collaborate closely with interdisciplinary teams, listen to their insights, and embrace a user-centered design approach. Regularly seek and incorporate user feedback into your designs, ensuring continuous refinement and improvement based on real-world experiences.

Zu Beginn ist es essenziell, die vielfältigen Nutzer und Ziele des Produkts zu identifizieren. Die Nutzergruppen sind oft heterogen und können aus internen Stakeholdern, sowie aus Endkunden (unterschiedlichen Segmente) bestehen. Explorative Ansätze z.B. Prozessanalysen, Interviews mit Nutzern, User Joruneys, helfen die Zielgruppe besser zu verstehen. Danach können quantitative Tests (Prototypen) die Konfidenz steigern (Usability Tests, Fragebögen, A/B Tests, Analytics). Das ungefilterte Feedback sowie unmittelbaren Eindrücke der Nutzer unterstützen das Entwicklungsteam dabei, ein tieferes Verständnis (Empathie) zu den Kunden zu entwickeln. Dadurch kann das Produkt zielgerichteter und meist auch schneller entwickelt werden.

Maturity in UX it’s a must. The organizations need to embrace UX in all possible ways and hierarchies of a company in order to really empathize with the users.

Your team should include a diverse group of people from various backgrounds, genders, ages, family dynamics, disabilities, etc. This will immediately up the empathy as folks share their perspectives and lived experiences. To encourage knowledge sharing among this team, host informal gatherings, rotate leaders, host lightning talks, encourage and express the importance of diversity and inclusion. You can also ask team members to use software you’re attempting to redesign. Collect their feedback in private interviews or surveys and share the results with the whole team to open up dialogue on how different people reported on their experiences. Cultivating diversity will also help in defining the right questions to ask in user research.

It's almost meditative, but we have to learn how to immerse ourselves into the user's personal experience. Active listening is only the start, we are also watching body language and monitoring other behaviors. To have a deeper sense of empathy we must become actors on the stage of our own minds. We will never be this other person, we will never fully understand their lives or their cumulative experiences, but what we can do is we can clear our minds in preparation for receiving their raw data in hopes of better interpreting that (personal experience) data. This is how we begin to understand and curate the experience our users would benefit from the most.

The order of this is off: Testing solutions come after knowing who your users are, Interviewing, observing, asking questions, and creating your assumptions through some output that you can test. Your first iteration is an assumption of what the user needs. Genuine empathy comes through user feedback. Knowing you are not the user and what you created will be flawed. You will challenge your bias by testing your iterations through additional interviews and interactions with your users. Ultimately, you are making a unique Information Architecture for a group of users that may differ from you. Mastery with empathy is to give actual value and understanding to the users, regardless of your opinion.

Meiner Erfahrung nach, sollten z.B. Usability Test, A/B Tests, nie statische betrachtet werden. Der Markt (damit auch die Nutzer) aber auch das Produkt kann sich verändern bzw. entwickeln. Es macht daher Sinn, Produkttests mit gewissen Intervallen durchzuführen sowie Informationen über den Markt einfließen zu lassen. Testen ist essenziell um den „Experten-/Entwickler-Bias“ zu relativieren sowie falsche Annahmen zu falsifizieren.

There is never a perfect solution. The goal is to explore a lot of solutions and validate to find the optimum one. Then find gaps in the optimum solution so far, and improve that to help the users better. Make sure to talk to a variety of customers, both direct customers and general people who might use similar products. Testing can be structured, where you give the user a task, or it can be free form, where users explore your solution and choose their own adventure. Both methods can bring valuable insights to your process. Nearly all solutions are based on assumptions. Validating these assumptions helps build a better understanding of the problem context, which in turn can lead to building better solutions.

Testing is so valuable when working on creating new IA or updating existing architecture. Every person has their own unique perspective which makes the way people group topics together slightly different. It's through finding out how your users would group categories, and balancing that with business requirements, that you can create a really effective architecture.

No test is perfect, so be sure to factor in all influences as we you walk users, or have them click through / interpret your work. Ask them to think out loud, and that no comment or thought is off the table. You want it all, the good, the bad and the ugly. They'll see things you'd never see and it's amazing to hear their feedback first hand.

One common mistake I have seen people make is not paying enough attention. You are always worried about your next move, the test script, your next question, the follow up, etc. But the most underrated research skill is active listening. When you listen not to respond, but instead to just absorb information, you make the most of the shared time, and understand more clearly in real-time. Paying attention to active listening can uncover great narratives , help learn about current gaps, and unmet customer needs and help shape the product roadmap. Listening to the stakeholders, observing their pauses, silences, body language, can help you uncover some unsaid things too, which can lead to better organic questions.

What I noticed with the research I did was active listening. Really listen to the user, not to be able to ask another question, but to understand the user. This helps to prevent errors, unmet needs, understand gaps, which improves the learning process. Another thing I learned was to observe the user, their silence, their body language, the way they responded, their facial expressions, this all makes you understand your user better and ask the right questions.

When working with others I find it vital to pay attention to everybody’s body, searching for non verbal cues that indicate how the person feels, that way it is easier to know whether the person feels comfortable or not expressing its ides

More of this can occur when you ask users or customers to "speak what they are thinking" and another key point is not to guide the conversation for or against your design work. If they struggle, let them struggle! Find out what's blocking them or creating friction. If they fly through something, ask them what made it so easy? You'll unlock scores of anecdotal information if you have the right users to test.

A través, del tiempo me he percatado que al escuchar y observar, he entendido que los usuarios evolucionan y cambian, es por ello que los patrones evolucionan y pueden ayudarte a través de AI, a descubrir nuevos patrones e ideas.

I often describe Information Architecture as an art. Every organization has an information architecture but not every organization has one written down or purposefully curated. Given this, there is no wrong way to approach IA unless you design it in a vacuum absent asking questions.

One thing I have noticed is finding the balance between specific and abstract. When trying to learn about pain points, peak levels, it's usually better to ask specific questions (example: "Tell me about the LAST TIME you faced a problem with your printer"). But when quantifying things (example: "how many emails do you send per week"), it's best to abstract the questions, and let the user answer abstract formats, like "on average", or "typically". Finding the right level of abstraction in your questions can help you guide your user to give the desired level of answers.

An additional activity to consider here are the home might we (HMW) statements. Questions that frame the user problem as an opportunity for design. HMW statements can help us define the scope and direction of our design solution, and help generate ideas.

Have a framework for your questions, but also allow your questions to go "off the reservation" if you uncover some really valuable information, especially if you are unlocking a business problem that's high value and adjacent to the one you are solving!

EL hacer preguntas siempre son una oportunidad para mejorar, para descartar, filtrar o separa soluciones o ideas previas, siempre con el foco de generar un punto de contacto entre el usuario y las marcas.

Self empathy is important in helping you advocate for your users. One way I do this is that I make myself use a complex architecture pattern that I'm interested in exploring. For example, if you are expecting your users to sort through lists of options, make yourself do the same tasks and understand what is required. How does the repetition make you feel? Literally making yourself do these tasks can take your perspective from sympathy to empathy.

Empathizing with yourself should also help you see and factor in your own biases when new information is delivered to you or revealed. I always take into account my own experiences when viewing anything, and I'm almost always surprised by the feedback I've seen which I find really exciting. Especially when it varies greatly from my own.

I’ve found empathizing with myself helps me when observing and learning users. It helps to more effectively identify nonverbal cues and prompts me to ask follow-up questions to understand deeper. Like a tight shrug when a user is explaining their thoughts aloud. For me when I do that it can mean stress, or uncertainty — after noticing the user’s shrug i know to ask questions to gauge their certainty of what their saying & if there’s uncertainty dig deeper as to why.

I define empathy as walking in the shoes of others. One way of doing this is to listen and learn from their stories of success, failure and reflective hindsights. Sharing my own perspectives and vulnerabilities without judging has allowed a greater sense of relatability.

Tell your story. The act of sharing your story starts the motivation to listen to other’s stories. Listening is key. What makes the difference is people feel heard. So in building a product, design, the user must feel heard. In one sentence, hear yourself in service to help your user feel heard and seen.

Aprender de los demás debería ser ley en todos los aspectos de la vida, la humidad y estar abiertos a los demás son características fundamentales para un diseñador de experiencia de usuario. Es algo que trasciende el mundo profesional y un buen UX aplica como rutina a su vida.

Envolvendo empatia considero um bom tópico "Abordagem de novas tecnologias com as equipes", esse claramente deve ser um assunto a ser seguido por todos que trabalham com tecnologia. Porém ter alguém que traga, discuta processos, metodologias e tecnologias inovadoras de forma clara para compor uma IA de qualidade e que agreguem valor, as equipes sentirão mais confiantes e dispostas a ouvi-lo por entenderem que está mantendo-os atualizados.

Empathy is not the best word to use. As a designer, I don't really need to feel the pain the user is experiencing. I have to understand the root problem behind the symptoms the user is complaining about. Feeling the same way the user feels doesn't enable me to get to the root problem better. When we get visited by the doctor, we don't ask to feel our pain; we ask to understand what's going on and provide a possible solution.

Information Architecture is not a career and so are not Empathy, UX Research, UX Analysis and UI Design. They all are part and parcel of a complete Suite called as UX Engineering Methodology. So it's most important to observe IA as a part of this methodology and focus on your entire UX Engineering Career. That's it. Also I am amused as to how people "Design" User Experience. The industry has been ruthlessly using the term UX Design when it actually is a myth. Don't raise you brows yet. It's true. UX is actually "Derived" through the User's Interactions (UI) with the User Interfaces (again shortened as UI) which are actually Designed. And the Interactions determine whether the Experience is Ok, Fine, Good, Bad or Horrible (Period)

Lamentablemente no se practica casi nunguna de estos puntos por falta de presupuesto, prisas en las entregas o simplemente desinterés. La gran mayoria de las empresas buscan hombres orquesta y no desarrollan estas metodologías. Basta con entrar en webs de opinión sobre grandes corporaciones para verlo.