UX for Developers: How to Integrate User-Centered Design Principles Into Your Day-to-Day Development Work

© Westley Knight 2019

Westley KnightUX for Developershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4227-8_7

7. Building Empathy

Westley Knight¹ 

(1)

Northampton, UK

 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, to be able to put yourself in their shoes. Empathy can easily be confused with sympathy, which is actually about feeling compassion or pity for the difficulties of another individual, but lacks the aspect of understanding the feelings of the party to which you are sympathetic.

In order to be able to empathize with someone, to share their feelings, you must either share a real connection with them or encounter the same experience. In earlier chapters, we mentioned that everyone’s experiences are unique; their view of the world is ...