What are the top priorities for any business: money, number of users, satisfied customers? All together, right? In other words, high conversion! The secret lies not in complex algorithms or expensive ad campaigns but in understanding your users on a deeper, more human level. This is about empathy in UX design. Why? Because you can't grab a cup of coffee and have a friendly conversation with each of your users. But you can show deep understanding (empathy) through the screen.
For us at Arounda, empathy-driven design is the foundation for all our projects. Clients often ask us about their low conversions, and the answer lies on the surface — because of a bad UX design. That's why our team decided to share our experience and prepare this article to solve some common problems.
In this article:
- Find out what empathy is in UI/UX design and how it differs from sympathy.
- Learn how to improve empathy in your design.
- Discover how to conduct user research to improve product KPIs.
- Get insights, practical tips, and examples from Arounda experts.
What is Empathy in UI/UX Design
Empathy in design goes beyond aesthetics. It's about creating experiences that connect with users on a personal level. You need to step into the users' shoes and understand their needs and difficulties during interaction with your product.
We recommend answering the question: "What does my customer really want to achieve, and how can I make it as easy as possible?". The answer will help you see potential problems or the complexity of some processes. Remember that people with unique needs are behind every click, tap, or swipe. Make them feel valued and supported, and they will love your product, trust it, and come back again and again.
Sympathy vs. Empathy
We can understand sympathy and empathy in relationships, for example, but what are empathy and sympathy in UX? Sympathy helps you understand the user's pain but doesn't necessarily fix the cause. Empathy goes deeper to understand the user's experience and create relevant solutions.
Let's look at an example: the checkout process in e-commerce. You notice that users are leaving their shopping carts during the checkout process. The designer assumed that users were simply confused about the steps and suggested adding tooltips or pop-ups to help them. These features are well-intentioned, but they don't remove the reasons why users drop orders. This is UX sympathy! If the designer takes a step back and explores the entire emotional user journey (conducts user research, identifies hot spots, and understands the specific frustrations they face) to understand the reasons, this will be UX empathy.
Improving and Analyzing Empathy in UX Design
Empathy in UX design is not a once-and-done thing! You should constantly improve your understanding of users and measure how well your design solutions meet their needs. It's about new strategies and actionable insights. At Arounda, we have the following plan for developing and analyzing empathy.
Understand Problem
Do you know how your users feel: overwhelmed, confused, or anxious? And why do they feel so? Here is the point: you must understand the emotions to design solutions that address the core issues. We start with comprehensive research using tools like user personas and customer journey maps to see what customers are going through at every touchpoint. Our designers match out their pain points, motivations, and expectations to gain a holistic view of the real problems.
Reduce Your Own Biases
If you think some features are great and clear, they may be different for users. Always question assumptions about user desires and behavior, as well as assumptions about their behavior. We involve cross-functional teams and user testing to eliminate blind spots and make sure the final design meets actual user needs. Observation and feedback are what work—not your guesswork!
Analyze Empathy
Start by tracking key usability metrics: task completion rates, time to complete tasks, or bounce rates. Then, compare the results with user feedback. Heatmaps and session recordings can also show where users struggle, lose interest, or quit tasks. Remember to do it regularly.
We have a great financial project—Infinity—where you can see an example of empathetic design. For this type of project (finance), it is very important to guarantee convenience because users feel stressed when they think about any financial operations. This is where empathetic UX comes into play. Just take a look at the results!
Develop Empathy Maps
An empathy map explores what a user says, thinks, feels, and does. Consider Dropbox's early approach to design. Their team found that users had trouble getting set up, especially understanding how files synced between devices. They created an empathy map and found that users felt confused (feeling), found the process too complicated (thinking), and expressed frustration with file syncing issues (saying). This led Dropbox to develop a more visual, simplified setup process with clear step-by-step instructions. The result: reduced user drop-off rates.
P.S. We will tell you more about the empathy map in the next section.
Observe Users in the Context
Watch users in their natural environment! You will see nuances such as distractions, physical limitations, and emotional reactions because you design for real-world conditions, not ideal scenarios. For instance, by observing how a user struggles with a mobile app in a noisy, fast-paced place, you can redesign the interface with larger buttons and a simplified layout.
Conduct Surveys and Interviews
Surveys can uncover broad trends in user behavior, while one-on-one interviews allow for exploring in-depth perspectives and emotions. Ask open-ended questions like, “What was the most frustrating part of your experience?” or “How did you feel while using this feature?”. Our designers always combine qualitative insights from interviews with quantitative data from surveys. This is how we get a full picture for more empathetic design solutions.
Empathy Map
An empathy map is an essential tool in the empathy design process. It covers the full emotional, cognitive, and behavioral spectrum of users. This is how you can increase trust and satisfaction and get higher conversion rates. To get a well-designed empathy map, divide it into four parts, each representing a different aspect of the user experience.
Our Arounda team recommends:
- Collaborate with designers, product managers, developers, and support reps to get different viewpoints.
- Avoid making assumptions! Use research-based information.
- Update your map regularly with new user research, feedback, or market changes.
- Apply empathy maps early in the development process.
- Pay attention to colors.
Interested in how to effectively create an empathy map (with all the details, steps, and examples)? You will find the answers in our article.
How To Conduct User Research to Improve Product KPIs
Integrating empathy helps identify pain points, behaviors, and emotional triggers that impact key performance indicators (e.g., user retention, satisfaction, engagement, task completion rates, conversion rates). Below is a detailed approach to conducting user research that improves product KPIs through empathy-driven insights.
Conduct Empathy Interviews
Ask open questions and encourage users to share their experiences, concerns, and emotions in a natural, conversational format. The goal: to understand what users did, why they did it, and how it affected their experience.
Track Power User Behavior
Tracking power users (those who interact with your product the most) provides valuable insights into user retention and loyalty. It lets you prioritize design improvements that benefit power users and broader user segments and take action to redesign or simplify certain features.
Monitor Happy Paths
A happy path describes an ideal user journey where everything works as expected, and the user reaches their goal without facing any difficulties. Tracking these paths helps you understand how users behave when they have a flawless experience and what features or elements contribute to this positive flow.
Use Heatmaps and Session Recordings
Heatmaps and session recordings are valuable tools for real-time user behavior analysis. You can see where they click, scroll, or abandon tasks. As a result, you can optimize design elements like navigation, call-to-action buttons, or page layout.
Build Empathy Maps from Research
As we discussed earlier, empathy maps help visualize and analyze user research. They provide a shared understanding of user emotions, behaviors, and frustrations to design intuitive and emotionally resonant solutions.
Update User Personas Regularly
User personas are not static. They evolve as your product and user base grow. That’s why you should regularly update personas based on new user research to align with your audience’s changing needs, behaviors, and expectations.
Practice Empathy at Every Stage of the Design Process
To effectively apply empathy in design, make it a core principle throughout every process stage—from ideation and wireframing to prototyping and testing. This approach helps avoid redesigns and makes your final product valuable for users.
Avoid Unconscious Biases in Research
Assumptions are a trap! Unconscious biases can skew your understanding of user needs, leading to design decisions that don't fit your target audience. Make sure your sample is diverse and representative of your broader audience, and use objective data to support quality insights.
Conduct Your Research in a Natural Environment
Observe users in their natural environment: at home, at work, or on the go. You will understand the real challenges and difficulties they face daily. This approach allows you to empathize more effectively with users and develop solutions that fit naturally into their lives.
Iterate Solutions with Prototypes and MVPs
Prototypes and MVPs help you test ideas with real people, gather feedback, and make improvements before launching a feature or product. This method reduces the risk of releasing features that miss the mark.
If you need help with your prototypes or MVPs, our Arounda team is here to help! We've designed well-received products and generated over $1 billion in revenue for our startup clients. So don't worry—you're in good hands.
Tools For Empathic Design Development
Empathetic designs require a mindset shift and appropriate tools to align design decisions with user needs and emotions. Our team created a list of powerful tools that help us foster empathy in the design process.
Now, we want to show you what the empathy process looks like. Take our project, Altflow, as an example.
Our Examples of Empathic Design: Altflow
Altflow is an AI-powered tool for creating SEO-optimized articles. When we talk about AI tools, empathy plays a critical role. Our approach was not just to understand the functional needs of users (copywriters, marketing teams, and SEO professionals) but to understand their emotional challenges.
We realized that content creators and SEO specialists face pressure to produce high-quality content quickly. Many tools offer automation, but users often feel disconnected from the final output (as the generated content may lack a human touch or brand consistency). They need articles that feel personalized, aligned with the brand tone, and require minimal manual editing.
Core features list
- Human and AI editing
We integrated the human and AI editing features to solve the problem of user frustration. It combines the efficiency of AI and human editing, allowing users to create SEO-optimized content while controlling the editing process quickly.
- Blog generator prompts for brands
Every brand has its unique voice, tone, and style. A one-size-fits-all content generator couldn't capture this diversity. Realizing this, we designed this feature to show the uniqueness of each brand. It gives users peace of mind because they know that the articles they create will match their messaging and tone, and they don't need significant edits.
- Templates
Users often struggle with maintaining consistency across articles, especially with multiple clients or brands. We designed the pre-built templates for easy creation of different content. This results in faster, high-quality content, reduced cognitive load, and enhanced efficiency.
- Multi-brand management and workspaces
Managing different styles, keywords, and article structures across different projects can be very hard. During our research, we identified a key emotional pain point: disorganized and stressful workflow. To address this, our designers introduced the Multi-brand Management and Workspaces feature. It allows users to create customized prompts, article generation settings, and templates for each brand within the same platform.
Our Arounda designers always use empathy in UI/UX design. We have different projects to show you where you can find inspiration.
Final Thoughts
Users expect brands to understand them, and empathy in UX design helps to fulfill this expectation. When you design with empathy, you create experiences that directly respond to users' needs, problems, and desires, fostering deeper connections. This approach helps build trust, reduce friction, improve key performance indicators, and achieve your goals.
At Arounda, we specialize in creating human-centered UI/UX or redesign solutions and MVPs for various industries. We've helped more than 170 businesses succeed and would love to help improve yours. Let us be your caring, empathetic partner.
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