In his keynote from Velocity NY 2014, Tim O’Reilly speaks about the link between DevOps and user experience design — empathy is the common thread. Tim notes:
“[Jeff Sussna says in his blog post Empathy: The Essence of DevOps]: ‘It’s not about making developers and sysadmins report to the same VP. It’s not about automating all your configuration procedures. It’s not about tipping up a Jenkins server, or running your applications in the cloud, or releasing your code on GitHub. It’s not even about letting your developers deploy their code to a PaaS. The true essence of DevOps is empathy.’
“Understanding the other people that you work with and how you’re going to work together more effectively — that word ‘empathy’ struck me and it made me connect the world of DevOps with the world of user experience design.”
In the design community, empathy is at the heart of delivering excellent user experiences. It’s not enough to know your user, you need to understand your user to create engaging experiences — experiences that add value.
Dan Hon, who writes and speaks on the Empathy Gap, notes in his newsletter:
“With ever increasing emphasis on customer service and user experience, the delta between what’s good and what’s intolerable inexorably decreases. That’s to say: once you’ve seen something with a good user experience, it’s hard to justify other experiences in the same category having a shitty user experience.”
Organizations, both public and private, are having to up their games. Just look at the story of HealthCare.gov and the humanizing work of Gov.uk — both cast a spotlight on how vital empathy and experience design are to improving our daily lives.
This post relates to our ongoing explorations into experience design and the Internet of Things and experience design’s role in the business world.”
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