Designing With Empathy

I am currently designing a language learning application to better familiarize myself with the design thinking process. To start, I performed a competitive analysis of current language learning applications and what they offer. After getting a comprehensive lay of the (language-learning app) land, I conducted user interviews of my target audience to gauge what needs were and weren’t being met. Additionally, I asked them what their daily life was like, how much time they wanted to dedicate to learning, and what their goals were. Through both of these steps, I was able to better identify where these current applications could be improved. I felt like I had an idea of what to design for and plan to build.

By the time I put my pen to paper (and spent no small amount of time doodling and warming up) the ideas were flowing. I took some time to create ideal user flows to create a guidepost for myself. A user flow is a path taken by a prototypical user to accomplish a certain task. In it, I defined their entry point, and what a successful outcome would be for a given task. An example of one of these might look like: adding a new word or phrase to their study collection.

Still, something didn’t feel right. I felt like I had a multitude of ideas, but lacked priority and direction. I pushed through the feeling for a time as I continued to sketch these wireframes and user flows. Then, I did some reading on user research principles and asked for some advice from industry professionals. After these readings and conversations, something clicked. I realized that even though I spent time gathering data from my early user research, I didn’t effectively organize it in a way that made it actionable for myself as a designer.

Following the advice I received, I took some time to revisit my interview data and craft from it an empathy map (above). An empathy map is a simple visual that captures knowledge about a user’s behaviors and attitudes. This empathy map helped me identify the thoughts, feelings, needs and wants of my users. From this time taken to re-organize my data, I was able to identify the most important challenges my users were facing. This gave me the direction to start designing with clear priorities of importance.

What is my biggest take-away from this, you ask?

In taking the time to revisit my data, I realized that I had not dedicated adequate time in the initial research phase to my information architecture. Information architecture is the organization, structure and labelling of content (or data) to be effective and sustainable. In my hurry to begin wireframing, I had cut short an important part of the design process. In my next project, I intend to dedicate a lot more time to not only the data collection process of user research, but also to the organization of that data.