Empathy Is Not Guessing What Users Feel
Empathy Is Not Guessing What Users Feel
I used to think empathy meant understanding how the user feels.
Now I think it means something slightly different:
Being willing to accept that I might be wrong about them.
That's a much harder thing to practice.
As designers, it's easy to look at a problem and immediately create a solution.
A user can't find something.
→ Add a button.
Users are confused.
→ Improve the copy.
People aren't completing a flow.
→ Reduce the number of steps.
Sometimes those solutions are right.
But before designing them, there is a more important question:
Why is this happening?
Empathy starts with curiosity
When I started learning UX, I often approached problems with assumptions.
I thought I knew what users wanted because the solution seemed obvious to me.
But users don't experience products the way designers do.
They don't see our information architecture.
They don't know our design system.
They don't understand the reasoning behind a feature.
They simply try to accomplish something.
And when the product gets in their way, they adapt.
They make mistakes.
They create workarounds.
They save screenshots.
They keep information in WhatsApp.
They write things down.
They ask someone else.
Those behaviours are often more valuable than what they say they want.
Empathy means observing the workaround
While working on MediSync, one of the problems I became interested in was how people reconstruct their medical history before an appointment.
The information might exist in several places.
A prescription in a drawer.
A lab report in email.
A previous conversation in WhatsApp.
A hospital record inside another app.
A photo somewhere in the phone gallery.
From the outside, this can look like a simple organization problem.
But there is something deeper happening.
The person isn't really trying to “manage documents.”
They're trying to answer:
“What happened to me, and what does my doctor need to know?”
That difference matters.
The first problem leads to a document manager.
The second leads to a system built around context.
Empathy isn't agreeing with the user
There's another misconception I have about empathy.
Empathy doesn't mean giving users everything they ask for.
If a user says:
“I want more features.”
The empathetic response isn't automatically:
“Let's build more features.”
It is:
“What problem are those features helping you solve?”
Sometimes the best thing we can do for a user is remove complexity.
Sometimes it's explain something better.
Sometimes it's prevent an error.
Sometimes it's simply give them more control.
Empathy isn't about pleasing the user.
It's about understanding the user well enough to make responsible decisions.
The danger of designing for people like ourselves
As designers, we're constantly exposed to products.
We know patterns.
We recognize icons.
We understand navigation conventions.
We know what a hamburger menu means.
We know that a blue underlined piece of text is probably a link.
Our users might not.
This is why I try to be careful with the phrase:
“It's obvious.”
If something is obvious to me, that tells me something about me.
It doesn't necessarily tell me anything about the user.
Empathy needs evidence
This is where research becomes important.
I don't want my empathy to become imagination.
I can imagine what a user might be feeling.
But I can't assume my imagination is accurate.
So I try to turn assumptions into questions.
Instead of:
“Users probably don't trust AI.”
Ask:
“What would make users trust or distrust an AI-generated result?”
Instead of:
“Users want everything on the dashboard.”
Ask:
“Which information do they actually need to make their next decision?”
Instead of:
“Users are confused.”
Ask:
“Where exactly does the confusion happen, and what are they doing instead?”
That shift—from assumption to investigation—is what empathy means to me now.
Empathy also applies to the business
Users aren't the only people affected by our decisions.
There are developers implementing the design.
Support teams dealing with edge cases.
Operations teams maintaining workflows.
Business owners watching costs.
And sometimes, there are people who never even interact with the interface but are affected by what it does.
Good product design considers those relationships.
Because a design can be delightful for one person while creating unnecessary problems for someone else.
What empathy means to me now
I don't think empathy is a personality trait that some designers naturally have and others don't.
I think it's a design discipline.
It means slowing down before solving.
Listening before explaining.
Observing before assuming.
Testing before defending.
And being comfortable saying:
“I thought I understood the problem. I was wrong.”
That's not a failure of design.
That's often where better design begins.
Empathy isn't designing what I think the user needs.
It's creating enough understanding to discover what they actually need.
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