Empathy in Design

Not even a day into ⁦@Superhuman (I know I'm late) and it's so much obviously better. LITTLE product choices like meeting you YES to a meeting this cleanly in feed shows so much empathy ⚡️

via Alexis Ohanian on Feb 22, 2021

I may be in the minority here but this isn’t what empathy in design means to me. Empathy isn't good UX or understanding user need. It’s rarely if ever even a feature you can boast about.

Empathy in design is taking into account how features you build might impact people and their psyche or emotional state. It’s designing to mitigate against abuse. It’s making decisions for accessibility default and normalized instead of buried in settings and off by default. It’s the tone you take when things go wrong and don’t make users feel inferior. It’s prioritizing people over metrics. Don’t reduce empathy to just another tech buzzword, it’s too important.

(Originally tweeted On Feb 22, 2021)