Empathy as a superpower

Using comic strips to advocate for users’ pain and create buy-in.

In 2010, a prominent banking client wanted to redesign their underwriting application. We worked closely with the business analyst and business stakeholders to optimize the business process.

We conducted a contextual enquiry to unearth the user needs of underwriters, account specialists, financial coordinators and business growth consultants. We could sense deep anguish and pain when users spoke of the badly designed system. It was important to communicate the users’ point of view. We documented the recommendations for process-level optimization and opportunities for interface screen-level enhancements.

While the development team was used to seeing flowcharts and screens, they missed the main actors of the system — the users.

We picked the user stories and created comic strips for each role. We showed their misery and pain when using the system.

Account specialists did not like that they had to manually enter every bit of data.

Underwriters were decision-makers who just needed to consume the data and not enter data.

This helped generate a lot of empathy for the users of the system. It moved the engineering teams and business leaders to make the recommended changes even if it would cost them more investment of time or effort.

It is important for designers to generate empathy towards the users of a system and motivate other teams to build really well-designed products. Empathy towards users can drive teams to be more engaged and driven to deliver the best outcomes.