Empathy and Experience in HCI

I looked at an article called Empathy and Experience in HCI by Peter Wright and John McCarthy. I read through it and highlighted what I found interesting and relative and I then put that in a summary.


Abstract
HCI researchers and practitioners have been developing methods, practices and designs ‘for the full range of human experience’.
A variety of approaches to understanding users and user experience, based on narrative, biography, and role-play have been developed and deployed. These developments can be viewed in terms of one of the seminal commitments of HCI, ‘to know the user’. Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience. In this article, we use ‘empathy’ to help position some emerging design and
user-experience methodologies in terms of dynamically shifting relationships between designers, users, and artefacts.

KNOWING THE USER IN EXPERIENCE-CENTRED
DESIGN

“designing for the full range of human experience may well be the theme for the next generation of discourse about software design”
The aesthetics of interaction, affective computing, ludic engagement, enchantment with technology.
The relationship between designer and user, and in particular what it might mean in the context of experience-centred design to ‘know the user’.
A significant challenge that starts with the need to develop an understanding of user experience and the epistemologies, methodologies and research practices it entails. HCI has made significant methodological and conceptual progress in response to this challenge. Methodologically, HCI has appropriated and developed a number of qualitative methods for eliciting or evoking experiences and developing descriptions of them that can be used in the design process. These include narrative and biography-based approaches such as scenarios, personae, and technology biographies, simulation and role-playing approaches, and interpreting user experience in HCI.
There are three broad approaches to applying and interpreting user experience in HCI. They include: the measuring approach, empathic approach and pragmatist approach.

PRAGMATIST KNOWING AND EMPATHY IN HCI
The possibility of an empathic relationship between designer and user has been explored in design and HCI.
Defined empathy as the human capability to be able to identify oneself with the feelings and ideas of another person.
Design empathy is needed when going from designing for practical functions to designing for personal experiences and private contexts. They see design empathy as a personal connection between designer and user that facilitates seeing and understanding users from their own position and perspective and as people with feelings rather than test subjects. We have tried to expand a little on what exercising this empathic skill might mean and our particular approach is informed by Bakhtin’s dialogical notion of ‘aesthetic seeing'
It involves a felt, valuational response from one’s own particular, unique value position to the other (the user) who is also seen as a separate and unique centre of value
It can sometimes involve strong feelings between self and other and is certainly always more than instrumental contemplation.
Central to the dialogical approach to empathy is the importance of each person engaging from their own perspectives and appreciating the other’s perspective as other.
The ‘designer’ does not have to ‘become the user’, rather the designer responds to what they see as the user’s world from their own perspective as designer.
Empathy training involves developing self- and other awareness and practical communication skills such as careful listening and responding. Try to understand what it must be like to be that person in their particular situation.
Communicating and relating allows the empathic person to respond in a meaningful way to the
demands of the particular situation confronting them.
Empathy evolves in the context of ongoing relationships wherein one person learns about the needs of the other by responding empathically, sometimes getting it right sometimes not, and then attuning future empathic responses. Without this communicative, relational framing
of empathy, each person has only their own emotional responses upon which to base their emotional response.

characteristics of empathic methods:
• The designer’s orientation to the other person, and whether they are motivated to understand and help.
• Their attention to the affective and emotional in relationships as the empathic response is specifically attuned to the perceived emotions and needs of the other.
• The kind and quality of relationship between designer and user that they propose, most particularly whether it is likely to provide opportunities to attune to the needs and emotional responses of the user.

EMPATHY THROUGH DIALOGUE

Understanding the other in everyday life and in user research often involves dialogue with them.
Ethnography and ethnography-inspired field work.
Participant-observation can be seen as an attempt to build up the kind of relationship, both participant and observer, both close and separate, that allows people to understand what it is like to be the other. “ethnography is concerned with the member’s perspective and the member’s experience"

Cultural probes
Like ethnography, Cultural Probes is interested in understanding what it feels like to be the other. Unlike ethnography, the aim is generally not to participate in or observe directly the practices of the other and the analysis is geared toward design rather than conceptualizing members’ worlds. The power of defamiliarisation as means of understanding. The aim is not to become the other but to make sense of the other through oneself.

Empathy through narrative

Dialogue, sympathy, identification and empathy involved in writing and reading. Experiential richness to these complex dialogues in which readers engage with the emotions of characters.

Narrative vignettes are short pen pictures of people in a setting have been used to capture the felt experience of working in a particular place or setting. includes vignettes in the style of short stories describing the day-to-day activities of workers going about the business of fixing machines. These rich descriptions the practical, intellectual, emotional world of the Xerox workers, perhaps by showing them as fully rounded people and perhaps also by making them particular unique individuals rather than abstract representations. As such they aim to draw out of the reader an empathic response, giving a sense of what it feels like to be one of those
repairers.

Scenario-based design also tries to capture users and their activities in stories with which designers and users can envision possible design innovations. Good scenarios describe a setting, the agents or actors, their goals and purposes, and the things they do. This is not
enough for empathic understanding and dialogue. A richer polyvocal world that has emotion as well as agency, character as well as plot, has to be created for readers to engage empathically with characters and author.

Character-driven scenarios.While typical scenario descriptions provide a rich account of what happens and what ‘the user’ is trying to do, they tend not to describe users’ motivations, personality traits, values, and attitudes."The character includes both personal (inner) and interpersonal (social, public, professional) elements. design based on ‘personae’ rather than ‘users’. unique characters with individual histories, thoughts and feelings. While character and
persona-based design pushes towards empathic relations, the characters and personae generated can be somewhat two-dimensional and lacking in depth. To understand what it is like to be that person in the scenario, the narrative has to provide the resources that allow readers
to identify with and maybe even for moments in our imaginations become that person.
Imaginative identification and point of view and first person perspective

Pastiche Scenarios
In this approach, existing well-known characters drawn from novels, movies and plays, are used as the protagonists in scenarios

Like the novel, film is also well understood to be capable of drawing out an empathic response from its viewers. Documentaries that aim to bring the everyday lives of people to designers through artistically made film documentaries.

Empathy through the imagined other
Role-play and experience prototypes have been employed as ways of engaging with imaginary users or imaginary user. In role-play designers act out how it might feel to be someone with specific characteristics, for example, what it might feel like to be disabled using props such as wheelchairs or suits designed to restrict movement. Experience prototypes are methods and techniques of simulating experience with a product, space or system in order to understand what it might feel like to engage with it.