<p>Product design and development is a subjective pursuit of value creation. It requires designers to communicate with users, understand user needs, and consider multiple values between designers and users, within teams and between teams, and other stakeholders in the entire design process simultaneously. The first and essential part is to understand users. Understanding users and their needs are believed to help designers to identify and reframe the design problem. Empathy is an essential ability for designers to step into users’ shoes and potentially discover users’ latent needs. Although empathy helps designers to better understand users, how much designers can actually understand the users remains unclear. To narrow this gap, it is essential to measure the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding. We adopt a psychological measurement to quantify designers’ empathic accuracy. However, the measure as such is time-consuming. This paper aims to shorten the experimental time while retaining the validity of the measure. As a result, this study reports the process of shortening the measure and compares the original instrument with the shortened one. The data collected from the shortened instrument shows an excellent internal consistency and between-subject variance and is able to reproduce similar results as the original longer measure.</p>

Measuring Designers’ Empathic Understanding of Users by a Quick Empathic Accuracy (QEA)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

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