Abstract
In user-centered product design, empathizing with users is an effective way to step into their shoes. Ideally, it helps designers understand user needs better and in more depth. However, the degree to which accurate empathic understanding contributes to needfinding and what exactly constitutes a ‘good’ need remain unclear. In this study, 13 designers watched a standard stimulus contextual user interview, performed an empathic accuracy task, and identified user needs based on the video. The needs identified from all participants were affinitized and summarized into a set of 23 user needs. They were scored for overall need quality, consisting of importance and satisfaction with current solutions as well as for need depth and latency. Designers’ empathic understanding was measured as the accuracy with which they could infer users’ mental contents and emotional tone. The designers’ emotional tone accuracy correlated with their performance in identifying important unfulfilled needs and needs where the users were most satisfied with existing solutions. However, no correlations were found for the empathic understanding of mental contents. In addition, need depth or latency was not found to correlate with any empathic understanding measure. These results are among the first to link empathy and designers’ performance in needfinding, but further studies are necessary to replicate and validate the results.