Know Your Audience by Practicing Empathy.: Objective

Know your audience by practicing empathy.
Put yourself in a human-centered mindset by thinking about your users in a new way, broadly but
also deeply. The best products, tools, or experiences come from Design Thinkers who listen to the
end consumers for whom they’re designing and have empathy for the people who will be engaging
with what they create. You can start looking at your project work from a more empathetic lens
today. But it’s also important to keep in mind that empathy is a learned mindset that you have to
practice and embed into your work over a period of time to truly know what it means.
Objective:
Practice putting people at the heart of your project work. Start by
thinking about people in the context of your current project work.
1 Find a space with a whiteboard (and grab your team

if you can).
Begin by writing on a sticky note each of the major users or consumers for
2 your project work, and arrange them on the board to show their relationships
to each other.
Next, for each person, write down everyone connected to them on sticky
3 notes. Place these people on the board around the stakeholder, and draw
the connections between each person, noting their relationship, influences,
incentives and any other relevant connection.
4 Use this map throughout your project to remember the web of

interconnected users.
1 | Shift Your Mindset

Reframe problems and challenges.
Reframing the challenge at hand is a way to expand your thinking and look at the problem you’re
trying to solve from a different lens. Sometimes, the problem phrased by the client focuses more
on the systems or technology rather than the people at the end. Reframing the problem in a
creative way ensures that you’re looking at the challenge from all of the right perspectives.
Objective:
Now that you know your audience, practice
framing challenges in creative ways to
expand your thinking. Reframe problems to
make them more people-centric.
Find a space with a whiteboard

(and gather your team if you
1 can) and begin by making a list of all the challenges you’re
trying to solve in your current project (refer to your extended
user map to stay human centered).
With this list of challenges in front of you, take one and rephrase the
challenge as a question, beginning with “how might we” (for example, if your
2 challenge is ‘poor data flow between departments’ your question will be ‘how
might we improve data flow between departments?’). Write the question on a
sticky note and put it on the board.
Your question should leave room for a number of different design directions.
3 If the question seems too narrow or too broad, try again, writing out a new
“how might we” onto a sticky note and placing it on the board.
When you come to your final “how might we” statement for each challenge,
4 arrange them on the board and refer to them as you continue in your
project. Let the “how might we” questions guide your creative thinking as
you work to solve these challenges.

Explore ideas by being more visual.
Sometimes you have to ditch the computer and pick up a pen and paper. Text can be put into
pictures and flows and diagrams into comics with story lines. Why? Because being visual can
sometimes achieve what words alone can’t accomplish. Storyboards, or comic-book style
sketches, can help to demonstrate value better than a lengthy description created using a word
processor. Here, we’re focused on showing others why an idea could work, not telling them what’s
so great about it.
Objective:
Practice exploring ideas by making
them visual.
Find a whiteboard (and gather

your team if you can) and begin
1 by identifying and writing down

one of the concepts/solutions you
are developing in your current
work that you would like to test.
Create a storyboard frame in comic-book style and draw how the concept or
2 solution will work. Create a narrative that shows how a person will interact
with and use your solution.
As you draw, think about the key features, or key moments of interaction,
3 that are vital to your solution – make sure to depict these so that others can
understand the solution.
Don’t spend more than 30 minutes drawing the concept. When finished,
4 share the idea with your team or a colleague and ask for their feedback to
your idea.

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Know your audience by practicing empathy.

1 Find a space with a whiteboard (and grab your team

4 Use this map throughout your project to remember the web of

1 | Shift Your Mindset

Find a space with a whiteboard

2 | Shift Your Mindset

Find a whiteboard (and gather

1 by identifying and writing down

3 | Shift Your Mindset

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