Scott Jenson
Scott has worked at Apple, Symbian, frog design and Google, working on Mac System 7, Apple's User Interface Guidelines, Newton, Google Mobile Maps, and lots of startups.
Empathy is a state of mind, not a specific technique
A design process paved with empathic observations will lead you, slowly and iteratively, to a better product.
Editor’s note: this post was originally published on the author’s blog, Exploring the world beyond mobile; this lightly edited version is republished here with permission.
If I’m ever asked what’s most important in UX design, I always reply “empathy.” It’s the core meta attribute, the driver that motivates everything else. Empathy encourages you to understand who uses your product, forces you to ask deeper questions, and motivates the many redesigns you go through to get a product right.
But empathy is a vague concept that isn’t strongly appreciated by others. There have been times when talking to product managers that my empathy-driven fix-it list will get a response like, “We appreciate that Scott, but we have so much to get done on the product, we don’t have time to tweak things like that right now.” Never do you feel so put in your place when someone says that your job is “tweaking.”
The paradox of empathy is that while it drives us at a very deep level, and ultimately leads us to big, important insights, it usually starts small. The empathic process typically notices simple things like ineffective error messages, observed user workarounds, or overly complicated dialog boxes. Empathy starts with very modest steps. However, these small observations are the wedge that splits the log; it’s these initial insights, if you follow them far enough, that open up your mind and lead you to great products.
The home automation paradox
Humans are messy, illogical beasts — we must create systems that expect us to be human, not punish us for when we are.
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Scott Jenson’s blog, Exploring the World Beyond Mobile. This lightly edited version is republished here with permission.
The level of hype around the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is getting a bit out of control. It may be the technology that crashes into Gartner’s trough of disillusionment faster than any other. But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure things out. Quite the contrary — as the trade press collectively loses its mind over the IoT, I’m spurred on further to try and figure this out. In my mind, the biggest barrier we have to making the IoT work comes from us. We are being naive as our overly simplistic understanding of how we control the IoT is likely going to fail and generate a huge consumer backlash.
But let’s backup just a bit. The Internet of Things is a vast sprawling concept. Most people refer to just the consumer side of things: smart devices for your home and office. This is more precisely referred to as “home automation,” but to most folks, that sounds just a bit boring. Nevertheless, when some writer trots out that tired old chestnut: “My alarm clock turns on my coffee machine!”, that is home automation.