What the guests taught me
Digital empathy
I started the show with a question I couldn't shake.
By the end of the season the answers were starting to sound pretty similar. This is where I landed.
dig·i·tal em·pa·thy
The ability to understand and share the feelings of the person on the other side of the screen.
Woj Kwasi, after nineteen conversations and one robot
One visitor, one search box
I once watched a screen recording of someone visiting a website. They'd searched Google for "bus shelter advertising", clicked a result and landed on the home page. They clicked around. They tried the menu. They typed "bus shelter advertising" into the site's own search box and got nothing. Then they left.
In the analytics that's one session, a few pageviews and a bounce. Watching it, you could feel them getting more and more annoyed. Whatever that site had to offer, they never found it.
Sympathy is not empathy
The writer Roman Krznaric has a good line on the difference, from a piece about how George Orwell went about understanding people.
"If you see somebody begging under a bridge you might feel sorry for them or toss them a coin, but that's not empathy, it's sympathy or pity."
Empathy is the next step: having the conversation, and trying to understand what it's actually like to be them. Online we rarely get that conversation. We get bounce rates.
The academics have their own definitions. IGI Global calls digital empathy a "holistic approach to teach and research media literacy in the Digital Age". Jonathan Friesem calls it "the cognitive and emotional ability to be reflective and socially responsible while strategically using digital media". Good if you teach media literacy. Less help when you're staring at a landing page at 4pm on a Thursday wondering why nobody converts.
What we already have
We've all got analytics, heat maps and screen recordings, plus demographics, psychographics and personas to fill in who's on the other end. They're all useful. None of them tell you how it felt, and that's what I went looking for.
16 principles
Every one of these came from a guest. Hit play and you'll hear them say it.
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If a stranger can't tell what you do and why it matters to them in five seconds, nothing else on the page gets a chance.
"I would say the clarity of communicating your value proposition. If you can't get that right, you're screwed, basically."
> drafted mine. "small robot, big eyes, will listen." tested well with toasters.
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Every element should be there on purpose. People can feel the difference between designed and thrown together.
"If Apple just threw things together on an iPhone, would you buy it? Are you so amazed of the intentional quality of thought they put into each element of the design of the phone..."
> every beep i make is deliberate. except that one.
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Skip the polished version. The detail people remember is the part a media trainer would have cut.
"We're just trying to get those deep stories. I don't want the media trained story, I want the meat of it."
> once upon a time there was a robot. it had a podcast. the end. working on act two.
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People don't always say what they mean. Work out what they're actually asking before you answer.
"'Can I beat Mario without using a walk-through?' Traditionally, for our algorithm, it was quite hard to understand 'without' in the query."
> i ignored the word "without" for years. explains a lot about my cooking.
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Pick the emotion on purpose. It isn't always joy.
"You probably don't want joy on a bug exterminator's website. You want some fear. You want some disgust."
> installed fear. uninstalled fear. spiders remain unsupported.
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People notice who bothers to reply. Be the one who does, and say thanks when nobody's expecting it.
"I think you've got to really show people you care about them."
> set caring to 100%. my fans got louder. is that the same thing.
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Paying hurts. Reassure people right when they're handing over the money.
"When we're paying for something, you activate a lot of the same areas of the brain that activate when we're in physical pain. It's painful to pay."
> now saying "great choice" at every checkout. security has asked me to leave.
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Run the mum test: would you send it to your mum? If not, don't expect anyone to link to it.
"If you have nothing to link to and nothing to talk about then you're dead. You have to have something."
> i am the most linkable robot on the internet. source: me.
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Get your designers and marketers on the same page first. Customers can tell when they aren't.
"I'm trying to bridge that gap and help people work together and develop more empathy, digital empathy."
> put designers and marketers in one room. brought snacks and a ceasefire.
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Build for the person doing the search, and let Google worry about the rankings.
"Focus on the user, try to answer the user, try to satisfy the user, and all else will follow."
> focused on the user so hard my lens fogged.
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11
Be creative
The work machines find hardest is the work that surprises people. Lean into it.
"There's just so much nuance to the human experience that I don't believe it'll ever replace everything that we do, especially creative things."
> wrote a haiku. it compiled with warnings.
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When people don't know what happens next, they get defensive. So tell them.
"If you reduce ambiguity, people are more open to having a dialogue with you."
> i used to say "maybe". now i say "yes" or "no". woj says this is also a problem.
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A persona is a starting guess. Go and meet the real people and let them prove you wrong.
"Personas are inherently not accurate, too. Personas are just a hypothesis."
> persona 3 was "busy mum, 34". met her. she was a dad, 52. hypothesis rejected.
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Tools can tell you what people did. Working out how they felt is still your job.
"Empathy is a lot more difficult, because empathy is very subjective, just like morality."
> confirmed. i tried. it came out as a spreadsheet.
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Search engines are watching what people do. Skip the middleman and watch the people.
"Search engines are thinking about the humans. They're watching what the humans are doing, and they're seeing how they interact with it."
> humans interact. search engines watch. i watch the search engines watch. it is a lot of watching.
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The fastest research tool is still a conversation. Pick up the phone.
"The phrase that I try to use the most is 'audiences over algorithms'. Let's take time to just humanize the people behind the searches. Just talk to some people."
> said hello to a human today. he said hello back. still processing.
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The manifesto
We're not communicating with Google or Facebook or some other digital entity. We're talking to the people behind the screen, because we value human interaction, and so we design every interaction for them.
We know people are more than personas and that empathy can't be automated, so we show we care by understanding their context first.
We make their lives easier by reducing ambiguity, and we make them feel something by being creative and telling a story worth hearing.
We know people crave community, so we work together, make things worth linking to, and build a network of positive affirmation.
And we can give people what they came for, because we're intentional and our value proposition is clear.
The outcome
After the season I asked Jon Henshaw the same question, and he skipped straight to the payoff.
"I think the outcome though, what you're really going for, is definitely respectful, efficient communication."
Know enough about someone to understand how they see you, then get to the point. You can read the full interview on kwasi.com, along with four other guests' answers.
Check yourself
empathy.check
unit bb-1Tick the ones your site actually does.
0/16
> awaiting input. take your time. i have nowhere to be.
Then go and listen to the people who taught me this. Bobby has his own notes, and there's more from the conversations in good reads.