Empathy tools

What it is

Empathy tools, such as clouded spectacles and weighted gloves, help you to actually experience processes as though you yourself have the needs of different users. Using them can help prompt an empathetic understanding for users with disabilities or special conditions.
We are interested in finding out not just what people are saying and doing, but also what they are thinking and feeling. The difficulty is that people don’t always do, think or feel what they tell you.
This is why it is useful to employ some empathetic research techniques. At the same time, empathy tools are a great for designers to use too, enabling us to break out of the trap of designing for ourselves and start to see the challenge from the point of view from the end user.

What you get

Empathy tools are a qualitative research method. Using them to carry out a few observations around the edge of a user group can be highly effective. With empathetic research you might closely observe some extreme users and gain lots of interesting insights which will inspire your service designs.

When to use it

Empathy tools are best used at the beginning of the design process in conjunction with ethnographic research. Sometimes, they become handy again during service prototyping when you are interested in observing users in the environment and context that they will be using the service that is being developed.