From the course: Empathy in UX Design
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What is empathy?
- Before we talk about empathy and user experience, let's just think for a minute about empathy itself and what it means more generally. Merriam-Webster defines empathy this way. "The action of understanding, being aware of, "being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing "the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another, "of either the past or present "without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience "fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner." Also, the capacity for this. So empathy is both the experience and the capacity to experience. It's experiencing what others experience. It's feeling what they're feeling. And simultaneously, empathy is also an ability to feel those feelings. So right now, I'm picturing some electrical wires passing from you to the other person as you both wear a strange-looking connected caps in some creepy science fiction sense. In reality, empathy is often a best guess,…
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