UX Fundamentals for Non-UX Professionals: User Experience Principles for Managers, Writers, Designers, and Developers

© Edward Stull 2018

Edward StullUX Fundamentals for Non-UX Professionalshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3811-0_21

21. Empathy

Edward Stull¹ 

(1)

Upper Arlington, Ohio, USA

 

President Ronald Reagan was moved. He had just viewed a private screening of The Day After, a 1983 television movie chronicling the aftermath of a nuclear exchange with the USSR. Reagan reportedly¹ developed such a sense of empathy with the fictional, irradiated residents of Missouri that, soon after the screening, he began nuclear disarmament talks with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A year earlier, the film makers had read Jonathan Schell’s, The Fate of the Earth , a book about the consequences of nuclear war.² Years before that, Jonathan Schell had read John Hersey’s ...