Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Human Needs and Desires

An Email Notification Experience

The more contained of these examples offer interesting grist for the potential benefit of meeting human needs and desires. For example, I recently consulted with a company about their automated email process. Each time a pre-ordered product was about to ship and, therefore, a customer’s credit card was charged, the company sent the customer an email notification. The problem was, the email took an entirely inappropriate tone. It told customers the company was “pleased” to be charging their credit cards, yet offered no updated information about when the actual product delivery would occur. Though this necessary touchpoint—communicating a charge was taking place—could have gotten customers excited in anticipation of soon receiving their products, instead it seemed to celebrate the worst part of the purchase experience: losing your money. Needless to say, we changed this and took advantage of the opportunity to make an emotional connection with customers, fueling their sense of anticipation while delivering the necessary information.

Plain-text customer service email notifications have virtually no capacity to affect people physically. Yet, with some good planning and effective execution, communications that are superficially analytical in nature can also have an emotional impact. Assuming the appropriate context, such messages can have far more impact on their recipients and lead to customers who more than just exist, but are even engaged and loyal. This outcome is a product of customers being recognized as people, not just entries in a database, or of establishing Congruence between what customers want and what you are offering, and even letting them know they have a very real modicum of Control, leading to your gaining their Trust and their feeling Accepted and, potentially, even Validated by virtue of your alignment. Over time, this kind of customer relationship can create a feeling of Safety, lead to Expression, and cultivate customers’ perceiving so much alignment between your company and themselves that it turns into Belonging. This is when you make the deepest impact on your customers, and when—in a business sense—your company can really win. And all of this can start with something as innocuous as an email message from customer service.

A Massage Experience

Many of us have had the pleasure of enjoying a massage. For those who haven’t, you might think of a massage as being a strictly physical experience. In fact, in expert hands, the experience of getting a massage is typically as much an emotional experience as it is a physical one. That is what makes getting a massage such a relaxing, rejuvenating activity. And it is the extras surrounding the massage experience that make this so. At the most basic level, a massage is being touched in a very intentional, non-sexual way. However, things like the scent of the massage oil, a dark, candle-lit room, appropriate music, the personality of and relationship with the masseuse—among other things—transform a massage into a truly wonderful experience that does more than just knead one’s muscles, but satisfies a myriad of physical and emotional needs as well.

Unlike the earlier email example, the massage experience is immediately and profoundly physical. Any competent massage goes straight into our productivity-level physical needs and desires. However, considering the massage in such a narrow way misses an opportunity to deeply engage the Emotional as well. If the experience is properly planned and executed—encompassing the appearance and personality of the masseuse, the design of the physical space where the massage takes place, and any accompanying extras—a good massage will delve deeply into the Emotional. More, one way this framework can prove valuable is in helping to brainstorm ideas for stretching activities to satisfy other needs and desires—such as taking a massage into the Analytical. In my experience, with a massage, the extent of analytical opportunity is limited to the conversation with and insight of the masseuse. However, brainstorming a bit, how could we design a massage experience that had an extreme analytical impact? Handouts with health tips? An audio book about the history and impact of massage? A device to wear over one’s eyes during a massage that transmits information silently? Not all of these are good ideas, but it is an example of how one could take an experience that superficially falls into one of the three Dimensions of Human Behavior and find a way to extend it into even the seemingly least compatible of the other dimensions.

A Hotel Room Experience

My third example, a hotel room, is a context that is the product of much design thinking and investment, because wealthy business travelers have money to spend and continue upping the ante on what they expect from their hotel experience. Recently, I had the opportunity to stay at the Hudson Hotel, a boutique Manhattan property by noted hotelier Ian Schrager. While the lobby and other public spaces were stylish, beautiful, and comfortable, our room was anything but. While the fit and finish of the room were superficially well designed, it was actually just a cheap veneer. And the room was tiny. The “Queen-sized” bed was closer in size to a double; there was less than two feet of space between the bed and the wall on every side. You couldn’t turn around without touching the wall. The same was the case in the bathroom. While this would be uncomfortable for anyone, it was particularly so for me, being a big 6'4". While my expectation of this high-end, boutique hotel experience was that I would experience something special, instead it was inferior to your garden-variety business chain hotel.

Hotel rooms offer delicious potential to take care of people. Physically, with a comfortable bed, plush towels, and silky sheets. Emotionally, with thoughtful service, beautiful décor, and nice touches. Analytically, with in-room entertainment, travel tips, and local information. When these and other things are done well and combined in the right proportions, a hotel can meet many human needs and desires. A positive hotel experience makes the process of leaving one’s home and sanctuary—where most of us derive our center and strength—pleasant, as opposed to uncertain. Those of us who have had the privilege of traveling around the world have indelible memories of our travels, and—at least for me—exceptional hotel experiences are a part of that. The hotels that are memorable, the ones that I recount stories about, are those that paid attention to and met or exceeded my needs and desires.

Of these three examples, the hotel room is certainly the easiest to consider: By its very nature, it is large and nuanced enough to encompass all three Dimensions of Human Behavior. The lesson from the hotel room experience is the importance of deeply accounting for the Analytical, Emotional, and Physical in order to help people reach the point of Well-Being—the highest level of needs and desires in the framework. It is difficult to create things like Ecstasy, Fulfillment, and Meaning. Not only is it nearly impossible to, for example, have Ecstasy without some degree of emotional connection to complement the Physical, it is generally much easier to achieve the level of Well-Being if all three dimensions—the Analytical, Emotional, and Physical—are being addressed at some level. Indeed, like a three-legged stool, the more balanced all three are, the easier it is to move up to the higher and deeper levels. The more opportunity and tools you have at your disposal for creating rich experiences, the more diligent you must be to take full advantage of them. In part, this is for traditional competitive reasons—to make sure you are not failing by virtue of not measuring up—but the real magic happens when you are focused and effective enough to take your experience design further in order to get as deep as you possibly can. That is where transcendent experiences happen and where the opportunity to become a clear market leader—or to charge unreasonable premiums that people will happily pay—really exists.

Putting the Framework to Work

There are four primary ways in which using this design framework and approach can dramatically improve the quality of experiences your company creates:

• organizational vision setting and brand planning—Companies that want to engineer their touchpoints to meet explicit needs and desires should weave these into a company’s very DNA and overall brand experience, not simply the tactical things they produce. How this happens really depends on the way each organization handles its vision setting and brand planning, which are company-specific, complex, professional activities. And exactly how a company should integrate this framework is going to vary from company to company. However, if a company’s foundational goals include identifying the needs and desires it most intends to meet, and a company makes this design framework available to all participants for reference and discussion at the appropriate times, throughout the integration process, a company can successfully build into its corporate essence an intentional focus on meeting explicit human needs and desires.
• experience planning—Even before a company first conceptualizes a product or service idea, there should be a clear vision and direction around its reason for being, and that reason for being should map to articulated needs and desires. Typically, the people responsible for this planning have titles like vice president or general manager or product manager. They communicate their expectations for a product—as well as those of the larger organization—to design and development teams in a document like a Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) or Product Requirements Document (PRD). Such documents should include explicitly stated needs and desires, mapped to the framework, with an explanation of how and why the eventual deliverable should meet those needs and desires. Design and development teams should also have a voice in determining or negotiating requirements, because creating things in such an intimate way—paying close attention to meeting needs and desires—requires a shared vision that reaches from the top all the way down to the bottom of an organization. Everyone involved in making decisions that contribute to the creative process should feel a shared ownership of what they’re designing and why. This will help ensure the development team actually meets expectations, as they strive to meet all of them.
• design validation—Good design practice involves testing and iteration of prototypes before implementing a final design. During this process, the defined needs and desires should be a key criteria in measuring design success. Go down the list and. for each, ask, “Is the design meeting this one?” If it’s not, you need to figure out why and iterate your design to achieve the intent.
• experience review—You can and should evaluate any experience in relation to the degree to which it meets needs and desires. After all, it is fine if one product has a smaller footprint than another or is more attractive than another. But what does that mean? Is it important? Why? By reviewing a product from the perspective of needs and desires—by asking explicitly what needs and desires, if any, it is meeting—you can draw more and deeper conclusions and insights about what you are evaluating. You can better identify market opportunities, product deficiencies, and transcendent ideas. It is simply a more sophisticated way of considering operating dynamics.

This applied empathy approach is very different from that of most companies. Not everyone is comfortable discussing deep human needs and desires in a mature and sophisticated way. Indeed, society has discouraged many of us from probing or being sensitive to such things outside the circles of our closest friends and families. However, as markets become optimized and international competition continually intensifies, it will become increasingly necessary to employ new processes and approaches in order to be successful in a competitive global marketplace.

This design framework attempts to open a beachhead for UX professional’s taking a methodical and systematic approach to developing and evaluating experiences that focuses on the most important consideration of all: meeting human needs and desires. I hope you find this approach interesting and useful, and encourage you to learn, try, and share these methods with others. 

Dirk Knemeyer teaches a class on Applied Empathy at the Involution Master Academy. If you want more information or are interested in attending the course and experiencing the methods for applying this framework in a hands-on context, learn more.

This series comprises three parts:

• Part One
• Part Two