Cultivating Empathy: How Working in UX Makes You a Better Person

“What is the craft of UX? What act defines its practice?” is one of the great questions in the world of user experience, possibly The Question. A graphic designer designs graphics. A developer develops software. A chef cooks. A sculptor sculpts. A UXD…UXes?

The question is one that has been asked since the field emerged, and will certainly never be answered, since your typical UX professional has never met a question they can’t find a hundred semi-satisfactory answers to.

For me especially, as someone who stumbled into the gap somewhere between UI designer, software developer, information architect, UX educator, and prototyper (prototypist?), it’s a constant struggle trying to figure out what the central activity of my job is.

The best answer I’ve come up with is that a User Experience Designer cultivates empathy.

I don’t think I’m what you might call a naturally empathetic person. When people talk to me about their lives, I don’t inherently feel how they feel. Empathy is usually described as a characteristic of your personality, a native attribute that you either have or don’t. In the glorious new world of the internet, where the online personality test is king, I think everyone and their mother has by now determined whether or not they are, by nature, “empathetic.”

But I think that version of empathy is overrated and oversimplified. Yes, there are some magical unicorns out there who feel the emotions of others as if they were their own, but those people are extremely rare. Empathy, like painting or riding a bike or playing the trombone, is a learnable skill, a muscle you can train with practice.

Most of the tools in a UX practitioner’s toolbox are shortcuts to manual empathy cultivation (or MEC, a new acronym I am officially coining) — personas, scenarios, contextual inquiry, storyboarding, interviews, think-alouds, etc. They’re quick and efficient ways to slip into another person’s shoes. But beyond those more concrete tools, to be a UX person is to constantly be forcing yourself to look at things from another person’s perspective, to exercise that empathy muscle.

To me, MEC (Copyright Cathy Fisher 2016) always feels like a switch I have to flip, when I deliberately force my own feelings and opinions aside and try to imagine things from someone else’s perspective. It’s tough at first, but it gets easier the more you do it. And the ability to go into MEC Mode (trademark pending) is what makes a good UX person.

Our beefy empathy muscles grant us special skills outside of the realm of understanding users, too.

From a business perspective, they allow us to more easily grasp and synthesize the perspectives and requirements of all the different stakeholders on a project — developers, sales and marketing people, product managers, leadership, third parties, what have you — which is great and helps us do our jobs better.

But more importantly (and to cash the ambitious check that I wrote in the title of this article) I’d argue that spending all day “gettin’ your MEC on” (hoping to make this a catchphrase — may need more workshopping) has positive moral effects as well. In a world where identity politics are the ethical currency of the day and communities are increasingly calcifying into units where everyone shares a homogenous viewpoint, it’s more important than ever for people, especially those with privilege, to be able to put themselves into an empathetic state on demand.

From my personal experience, I can say that over the past few years, I’ve increasingly found myself stopping when I encounter someone whose opinions I don’t understand or agree with and taking a moment to attempt to empathize with them before I respond. I’m certainly not perfect at it yet, but it’s definitely a positive change.

Maybe one day, I too can take an online personality test that tells me I am officially empathetic. But until then, I’ll keep flexing my empathy muscles and doing UX.