Reducing the Empathy Gap with ChatGPT
During my product design career, I‘ve often leverage various methods to understand what people want, from analyzing quantitative data to conducting qualitative user research.
But sometimes, I’m stuck with a design project that’s just not in my wheelhouse, and I have no idea where to start.
In this article, I will be discussing a tool I created called “Role Playing,” which has helped me overcome design challenges beyond my area of expertise. Additionally, I will explore how incorporating ChatGPT can further enhance the efficiency of this process.
News: A Uncharted Territory
Before my design journey at SmartNews- iOS/ Android news aggregator app, I was all about building utility tools like apps that teach you how to play piano or edit your photos and videos. Having some expertise in those areas made designing easier for me.
Meanwhile, designing for a news app is totally a uncharted territory for me.
Even though I read news often, the idea of creating features for specific news topics could be intimidating, to be honest.
The General Process
When I first started designing for SmartNews, I kicked things off by auditing our competitors and examining their screens and interactions to understand why they were designed that way. With this foundational knowledge, I conducted a series of unmoderated user interviews to observe how people were using similar features. In the end, I consolidated these insights for further design requirements.
However, during a stakeholder meeting, I discovered that a news content expert could have been a huge help in the early research stage.
Content Expert’s Superpower
One thing that really stood out to me about content experts was how they had this superpower to:
Bridge the empathy gap. The gap between what the user is feeling and what we’re feeling as designers.
Content experts were good at asking questions that helped bridge the empathy gap. For example, when it came to designing features for sports news, they would ask things such as:
“Where to see the live game score?”, “How to find the roster for my favorite team?”, or “What other sports news do I need to keep up with?”
It was not just the questions that they asked, but also how they distilled the insights and transformed them into actionable design requirements. Their ability to focus on the key tasks and pain points that users faced allowed us to ideate designs more effectively.
Role-playing Like Users
And then it hit me: Even I can’t be the expert, what if I could just pretend to be the user? Like, role play? It may sound a little silly, but perhaps utilizing the Empathy Map could facilitate this process.
About Empathy Map
As we know, empathy maps are widely used to help designers understand and empathize with users by capturing their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors during user interviews.
This visual framework provides a structured approach for teams to gain insights into user needs, challenge, and motivations.
Modifying the Traditional Empathy Map
My idea was to create a modified empathy map centered around the user’s news reading journey. The 5-step process aimed to put myself think about user’s background knowledge, expectations, tasks, and actionable opportunities for design.
Step 0- Simple Persona for This Role
Consider key elements that make up this character, such as age, gender, or background in relation to this news feature.
Step 1- My Background Knowledge:
What do I already know before using this news feature?
Step 2- My Expectations
What do I think & feel when I’m about to use this news feature?
Step 3- My Tasks
What are the questions that I would like to get answers to while using this news feature?
Step 4- Design Actionable Opportunities
What actions can I take as a designer to assist users in completing their tasks?
Start Role-playing!
Let’s say we are introducing a new “Stargazing” features that allows people stargaze from any location.
I’m not a stargazing fan, but if I can try to put myself in the users’ shoes, maybe I can come up with some ideas myself.
Step 0
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Great! Now I have several design ideas to explore further with additional user research to gather more insights to present to stakeholders.
Downside
Although my empathy map role-playing was handy, but coming up with different roles and scenarios was hard. Even with help from designer peers, it’d took forever…
Incorporating ChatGPT!
And now, here’s the exciting part — using the power of AI to take this role-playing process to the next level!
I mean, why not just copilot with AI to save time?
Here is an example of how I use ChatGPT to come up with 5 different personas for this stargazing news feature in seconds!
Prompt:
Now you will be playing as users of a star gazing feature in a news app. Come up with 5 personas considering key elements that make up this character, such as age, gender, or background in relation to this news feature, and answer the following questions:
1. What do I already know before using this news feature?
2. What do I think & feel when I’m about to use this news feature?
3. What are the questions that I would like to get answers to while using this news feature?
4. What actions can I take as a designer to assist users in completing their tasks?
Layout everything with table format.
Results:
ChatGPT was able to generate a diverse personas ranging from high school students who are passionate about astronomy to seasoned scientists who are looking to stay up-to-date on the latest astronomical discoveries.
The diversity of the personas would make sure this feature is accessible and useful to a wide range of users, regardless of their level of knowledge or experience.
Additionally, if you want to request ChatGPT to generate more content for a particular role, you can do so by writing:
Give me 3 more desired actions for Rachel
Then ChatGPT offered more user tasks according to Rachel’s background.
Or, you wish to include more settings to generate a persona, you can do so by adding more details:
Add a handicapped role and only show this persona
ChatGPT suggested adding a persona who is visually impaired and updating the responses to reflect accessibility concerns. It also included a new column, “Accessibility Considerations,” for me to use when evaluating the design to ensure that Maya can use the feature.
Conclusion
The combination of the role-playing empathy map and ChatGPT provides me with endless opportunities to enhance my understanding of their users.
Using these tools in the early exploration phase can help bridge the empathy gap between designers and users, allowing for a more user-centered approach to design.
By leveraging these tools to identify pain points and refine the design scope, designers can streamline the design process. As a result, the design process would become less ambiguous and more focused on meeting the needs of the users.
