For Any Product to be Successful, Empathy Is Key * Jon Kolko
November 20, 2014

Meet Mary, a college student I met at a Texas state school. She’s a Junior, and she’s changed her major three times. She picked her first major because her mom told her to. She picked her most recent course of study because her best friend is doing it, too. Mary wants to travel the world when she graduates. She’s very aware of the amount her education is costing her family. She loves college, but she’s anxious about her future. She’s anxious about decisions. She’s anxious about everything.
Now imagine you’re designing a product to try to help Mary ease her anxieties. Based on this fairly typical profile of a college student, you can start to intellectually analyze Mary and her situation. But what you really need to create a good product is empathy, and empathy isn’t about intellectually knowing – it’s about feeling. To feel what Mary feels, you need to spend time with her, learn about her specific wants, needs, and desires, and get to experience her emotions. In the world of design-led product innovation, pursuit of empathy is the key to success.
To reap the benefits of the other ‘e’ words that we hear so much about when it comes to creating products (experience, engagement, and emotion), you need to have empathy with the people who will buy, use, and experience your products or services. If you are building products for college students, like I am, that means feeling what it’s like to be a college student. But that’s general, and empathy is specific: it’s feeling what it’s like to be a specific college student.
At Blackboard, we’re evolving a fifteen year enterprise. Blackboard literally invented the LMS space, and has since focused on feature-rich products that benefit large institutions. But over the last year, we’ve slowly pivoted the business to focus on experience-rich products that benefit students. We’re committed to helping college students succeed in their academic journey. That means we can’t get away with products CIOs love to buy; we need to build products students love to use. And that means we need to spend quality time with students and teachers. We’ve been in their dorm rooms, watched them watch TV, and learned about their anxiety around school. We’ve learned about how adjunct teachers juggle classes at four different schools yet know every student by name, and we’ve heard about how teachers fear punitive recourse as a result of discussing their distrust of their administration. These are experiential facts – that’s knowing. But more importantly, we’ve started to feel what it’s like to be a part of the college experience. The knowing helps us convince ourselves and our stakeholders that our products are financially sound, our strategy is rational, and our tactics will succeed. But the feeling drives every single product decision we’re making.
Empathy is the secret. And the catch-22 is that you can’t actually ever feel exactly what Mary feels, or the millions of other Marys, because Mary’s journey is her own. It’s based on the richness of her entire life experience, the baggage of her childhood, the norms instilled in her by her family, the town she grew up in. You might be able to know what Mary knows, but to really feel what she feels, you would have to become her – which, of course, you can’t do.
And so complete empathy is impossible, but the pursuit of empathy is not, and it’s this pursuit that can be methodically taught and learned. Empathy is a spectrum, with you on one side and Mary on the other. The closer you get to Mary, the more likely you are to build a product that she’ll find usable, useful, and desirable.
You’ll never be sure just how close you get, and that’s the fine point of innovation risk. But you can minimize that risk by spending as much time with Mary as possible. The closer you get to her, the better you can start to predict her behavioral intent. You can anticipate how she’ll respond in a situation. And as you balance this specific emotion with a larger market context – as you think generally about how Mary’s emotions are shared by others, and feel specifically what it’s like to be Mary – you’ll find yourself building well-designed products that people love to use.