Practical Empathy
For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work
Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.
Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.
Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.
Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.
Testimonials
Customer Experience is now a key competitive differentiator; however, to truly stand out, organizations need to have and apply empathy for their customers.
This wonderfully insightful book teaches us why empathy is important, how to gain it, and how to apply it within our businesses.
Richard Dalton, AVP Experience Design, USAA
Practical Empathy will convince designers and product managers how and why empathy is a key ingredient to both product innovation and organizational success.
Sam Ladner, author of Practical Ethnography
Practical Empathy is a straightforward guide to extracting greater ROI from the squishiness of empathy.
Harry Max, VP Product AllClear ID
Your product design should be informed by a deep understanding of user goals. In Practical Empathy, Indi outlines a way of working that goes beyond data-driven research methods to deliver genuine empathy for the people who use the things we make.
Karen McGrane, author of Content Strategy for Mobile
As a designer, manager, husband, and parent, a lot of people will tell you that you should listen more, but few are able to show you how it’s done. Practical Empathy analyzes in great detail what kind of mindset leads to serious listening. If you do a lot of interviews, you will already follow many of the mentioned principles unconsciously. To see the principles of listening and understanding uncovered and made clear is a powerful help to the daily activity of anyone working in the design business.
Oliver Reichenstein, CEO and Founder, Information Architects, Inc.
Understanding the ‘story of why’ is exactly the strategy we use to align our product roadmaps. Indi’s guide is clear and helpful, and shows how to develop empathy for users.
Eric Fain, User Experience Architect for Autodesk Infraworks
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Business Is Out of Balance
Chapter 2: Empathy Brings Balance
Chapter 3: Put Empathy to Work
Chapter 4: A New Way to Listen
Chapter 5: Make Sense of What You Heard
Chapter 6: Apply Empathy to What You Create
Chapter 7: Apply Empathy with People at Work
Chapter 8: Apply Empathy Within Your Organization
Chapter 9: Where Do You Go from Here?
FAQ
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Indi Young’s book Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work . You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- How are you using the word “empathy?”
This book is not about the kind of empathy where you feel the same emotions as another person. It’s about understanding how another person thinks—what’s going on inside her head and heart. And most importantly, it’s about acknowledging her reasoning and emotions as valid, even if they differ from your own understanding. This acknowledgment has all sorts of practical applications, especially in your work. This book explores using empathy in your work, both in the way you make things and the way you interact with people.
Chapter 2 introduces the nuances among different types of empathy.
