【英文版 10】Building Empathy

The inspiration phase starts withempathy. What we mean by that is we do field work to enable us to empathizewith the people we're designing for, and then only after that do we begin brainstormingideas or solutions to their problems. In this lesson, I'll share examples ofhow teams came up with better ideas than they would have come up with otherwiseif they had not used a human centered design process. And what I want toemphasize here is that the insights that led to their idea came from theirfield work. This is different from coming up with an idea and then latertesting it in the market.

大家好，欢迎来到创新思维课。在上节课中，我们讲到了创意的灵感阶段，在灵感阶段的工作中，我们首先要做的就是共情。也就是说，我们需要进行实地考察，站在用户的角度进行思考，然后我们再进行头脑风暴，去想出解决用户问题的方法和创意。在这节课中，我会和大家分享一些具体的事例，看看这些创新团队是如何通过以人为本的设计过程产生优秀的创意的。在这里我想要强调一点，那就是，他们想出的成功创意都来自于他们的实地考察，这和先想到一个点子，之后再进行市场测试是不一样的。

IDEO's method starts with gathering information. We've talked a lotabout this company, IDEO, and the method that they became famous for startswith gathering information. The process always starts byapproaching your problem from an open ended, open minded perspective. Unlikeanalytical problems, creative problems are by nature open ended and illdefined. They require a broader information search for possible solutions sinceobvious solutions have been tried before and the existing solutions are notsufficient to solve the problem. A new solution will come from a novel way ofunderstanding the problem, and this takes a lot of extra work. One of the mainthings that differentiates human-centered design from previous approaches todesign and the reason for its name is that the process starts not with whatdesigners think people will want, but with empathizing with the people who willactually use the product. The idea is that the people you are designing forknow better than anyone else what frustrates them about the existing solutionsto their problems.

我还是首先以IDEO公司为例，我在之前的课程中也向大家提到过这家公司，它的每一次创新都是从收集信息开始的，这种工作方法很值得我们学习。通常，IDEO的创意团队会发散自己的思维，带着开放的态度来解决客户的问题，因为，创意类问题不同于分析类的问题，创意类问题本身就是充满多种可能性的，并且没有绝对定论。因此，想要解决创意类的问题，我们必须要进行更广泛的信息收集来找到可能的解决方法，毕竟，那些显而易见的解决方式都已经被尝试过了，并且都没能成功解决问题。如果我们想要找到一种全新的解决方案，我们通常需要找到理解问题的新角度，这句会花费我们很多额外精力。以人为本的设计理念与以前所有的设计方法都不相同，其中一个主要区别就是，这个理念关注的不是设计师认为自己的客户需要什么，而是用户究竟想要什么，这也是以人为本这个名称的由来。这个理念的原理在于，只有真正的产品使用者才最清楚目前的解决方案令人不满意的地方是什么。

Through field work, human-centereddesigners work a lot like anthropologists. They go into people's homes andsometimes their workplaces, and they interview people. They engage with and observepeople using products and services and attempt to uncover their needs and todevelop insights about their feelings about their product experience. Thisprocess is done in a semi-structured way that we'll learn in this course. It'sdesigned to build empathy and to allow designers to identify physical,cognitive, social, and/or cultural needs that they can meet for people throughdesigning better products, services, and experiences. Human-centered designerslearn to focus less on the problem and more on the person and to search forinformation and insights about the end user before defining the designchallenge.

在实地考察过程中，这些将“以人为本”理念作为自己设计原则的设计师，他们工作方法甚至跟人类学家很相似。他们通常会进入到人们的家中，或者是工作场所来对他们进行采访和调研。他们通过接触和观察用户，来尝试了解他们的需求和产品使用体验。这个过程会以一种半结构化的方式来进行，这也是我们会在这节课程中学习的内容之一。这种“半结构化”方法能够很好地让设计师产生共情，并帮助他们了解用户的生理、认知、社会、文化等各种需求，从而设计出更好的产品、服务和体验。相比于关注具体问题，以人为本的设计师会更加关注用户本身，通过更好地了解终端用户的信息和需求，来帮助自己确定最终的设计挑战和方向。

Let me give you a quick example to showyou what I mean. Before getting a PhD in the psychology of design, I trained asan architect. Early in my career, I lived in South Africa, and I worked at adesign firm called ARG Design. We were selected for an informal settlementupgrading project in the Cape Flats, which is outside of Cape Town. Informal settlementsis a term for what might otherwise be called urban slums. The project was basedin an extremely challenging environment. This settlement was made up ofthousands of makeshift shacks. These were serving as houses and had no formalconnection to city sewage or water. This area had really high unemploymentrates, low opportunities for education, high rates of violent crime, rape, andhealth risks, including HIV. And our job, at minimum, was to help upgrade theshacks in this area to more formal housing structures, but ideally our designwould do so in a way that improved the quality of life in other problem areas.

接下来，让我给你们举一个简单的例子，帮助你们更好地理解我的意思。在我获得设计心理学博士学位之前，我的专业是建筑师。在我的职业生涯早期，我居住在南非，并且在一家叫做ARG Design的设计公司工作。有一次，我们公司需要进行一项非正式居住区的改造项目，那个地方叫做开普敦公寓（Cape Flats），但这个公寓其实是位于开普敦城区之外，而所谓的非正式居住区其实就是城市里的贫民窟。这个贫民窟的周边环境非常糟糕。这个居住区是由数千个临时棚屋组成的，这些房子虽然也有人居住，但是却并没有连接到城市的污水处理系统以及供水系统。这个片区的失业率极高，教育普及程度也非常低，而且还有很高的犯罪率、强奸率以及包括艾滋病在内的疾病感染率。我们给自己设定的最低目标，是至少要将这一片棚屋区改造成一个更正式的居住区，并且如果可能的话，我们还希望这次改造经验能够在未来得到复制，去提高其他问题区域居民的生活质量。

Before human-centered design, the way toapproach this project would go something like this: Our design team, from thecomfort of our offices in Cape Town, would imagine all of the problems thatmight exist in this community, and we would decide which were the mostimportant ones to solve. I can tell you what we thought they were. We thoughtthat the biggest problems in this community were water and sanitation. And atthe start of this project, we did all sorts of studies on water and sanitation.At the time, 200 families would share one tap of water, and that tap wouldoften be clogged. This made access to clean water very difficult and access toclean sanitation was all but impossible. There were areas where children wouldplay in ponds that were effectively open sewage. These are conditions that leadto a variety of health problems that can be spread easily throughout thecommunity. And if you're not healthy, you can't even begin to get serious abouteducational and entrepreneurial opportunities. And so we thought that if wecreated separate water taps for cooking and washing, we could reduce theregularity of clogged taps. And we thought that if we combined that with drysanitation toilets, which are a way of providing sanitation until an area canbe connected to the city's sewage system, we thought that if we integratedthese two solutions, we would also improve health outcomes, and that that wouldoverall improve the quality of life in this community. That all sounds prettygood, right? The problem is that we were wrong, and the only way that we couldhave learned how wrong we were is by leaving our office and going into thecommunity that we were designing for to understand their needs from theirperspective. Want to know what the most pressing issue really was? What was themost critical thing that we needed to design for? It might surprise you, but itwasn't even on our list of the most important problems in the community.

如果不采用以人为本的设计方法，我们进行这个项目的方式大致是这样的：整个设计团队只需要呆在我们舒适的办公室里就可以了，然后大家一起想象这个社区中存在哪些问题，接着，我们会确定其中最急需解决的问题是哪些。讲到这里，我可以直接告诉你们我们当时是怎么想的。我们很想当然地认为，这个社区最大的问题就是用水和卫生的问题。因此在这个项目刚开始的时候，我们团队研究了那里的用水情况以及卫生情况。在那个贫民窟中，每两百户人家需要共用一个水龙头，而且那个水龙头经常会堵上，这让大家很难用上干净的水。而卫生环境的情况就更糟糕了，在有的地方，小孩子甚至会在污水坑里面玩耍，这样的情况导致各种疾病都会非常迅速地在整个社区内传播开。这样不乐观的健康情况，让教育和就业也变得更加困难了。因此，我们的设计团队开始考虑，要将这个社区中用于做饭和洗漱的管道分开，这样就能减少水管堵塞的情况。同时，我们可以为每个区域设计干式的厕所，这样，在这里的排泄废水连接到城市的废水管道之前，卫生环境能够有所改善了。我们觉得，如果将以上提到的两个方法结合起来，我们就可以提高这个社区的健康情况，同时让这里的整体生活质量有一个全面的提升。这样听起来，你们是不是觉得这个方案还不错？但是问题在于，我们的方向出现了错误，这个错误，是在我们采用了以人为本的设计方法、对社区进行实地考察后，设身处地的从居民的角度思考他们的需求，才得出来的，如果不是采用了“以人为本”的设计方法，我们可能根本无法发现自己的错误。你们想知道这个社区真正最急需解决的问题是什么吗？到底什么才是我们需要进行设计的重点呢？这个答案或许会让你们大吃一惊，毕竟这个问题甚至都没有出现在我们预设的重要问题列表里。

We spent a few months doinghuman-centered design research to empathize with people living in thiscommunity. We quickly learned that their most urgent need was not for cleanwater or for sanitation, although those were indeed important problems. Theirmost urgent need was to reduce the risk of fires. It turns out that fires werereally common based on the methods of cooking used in this community. And ifone fire started, it could take down many shacks and sometimes the wholecommunity, affecting the lives of many, many, many families. Everyone wouldhave to rebuild all over again.

当时，我们花了长达几个月的时间进行调查，根据以人为本的设计理念，我们开始尝试与这个社区中的居民产生共情。很快我们发现，对于这个社区来说，尽管提供干净的水和卫生设施也很重要，但是当务之急，却是解决火灾频发的问题。我们发现，由于这个社区内采用的特殊做饭方式，这里经常会发生火灾，而且一旦某一个地方不小心失火，周围的许多棚屋甚至整个社区都会被牵连，这会影响到无数个家庭的生活，因为这里的每个人都需要重新建造自己的屋子。

Once we understood this need, providing asolution for it was remarkably simple. All structures in our design wouldinclude at least one fire-retardant wall. Discovering this freed our team to goon to solve many of the other pressing needs. Not only were we able togenuinely provide a meaningful upgrade to the daily lives of the people livingin this area, but our team went on to win a global award from the Holcim Awardsfor Sustainable Construction, and that award allowed us to go on and do evenmore for other communities later on.

一旦我们了解到了这个需求，找到解决的办法就变得非常简单了，我们只需要在设计的时候为每一栋建筑设计至少一面防火墙就可以了。于是，在发现并解决了最主要的问题之后，我们的团队便能够开始逐一解决其他的难题了。这一次的设计项目，不仅让我们真正提升了这个区域居民的日常生活水平，还让我们的团队获得了Holcim Awards可持续发展建设奖（the Holcim Awardsfor Sustainable Construction），而这个奖项也让我们有机会在后来帮助更多其他社区。

This story shows us how human centereddesign forces us to slow down our thinking, to question our assumptions aboutwhat people want or need. And this can be especially important when we'rereally confident about those assumptions. Our job as human-centered designersat the start of a project is to tap into the world view of the user rather thanjumping to the solution generation phase based on our own existing values,views, and assumptions.

我给大家分享这个故事的原因，是想要告诉你们，以人为本的设计理念能够使我们降低决策的速度，让我们重新审视自己提出的用户需求假设。这在我们对自己的假设过分自信的时候往往很重要。作为以人为本的设计师，我们应该在开始一个项目之前就先了解用户的世界观，而不是根据我们自己现有的观点和假设想当然地直接开始寻找解决方案。

We call this first phase of empathizingwith people we are designing for "fieldwork," and it's common in mostforms of what researchers call "ethnographic research." This processis similar to what anthropologists do when they study cultures by living withthem and working with them. But human-centered design is simpler, and it's beenadapted for the purposes of innovation. The process involves trying tounderstand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researcherswho ask specific, highly practical questions like "Would you buy thistoothpaste or this one?" Anthropological researchers visit consumers intheir homes or offices to observe and listen to them in a non-directed way. Inthe fieldwork stage, we focus on a few key things. The design team observesbehavior relevant to the problem. If the design team is interested intoothpaste, they'll focus on things related to oral hygiene. They begin tointerview a wide spectrum of users. We often suggest that a third ofparticipants should be people who are early adopters in the area. These peopleadopt new technologies or solutions quickly. For oral hygiene, these might bepeople who always have the latest electric toothbrush or maybe they own a lotof oral products.

在设计的第一个阶段，我们要尝试与我们的用户产生共情，这个过程也就是“实地考察”，这种调查方法其实在“人类学研究”中十分常见。这个过程和人类学家的工作方法十分相似，他们在研究一种文化的时候，就会和当地的人一起生活和工作。当然，以人为本的设计过程会更简单一些，它在以创新为目的的基础之上进行了调整。在实地考察过程中，我们需要了解目标用户是如何生活的。不同于传统的市场调查者，我们不会询问一些太过具体的问题，比如说“这两款牙膏你想要买哪一款”。类似于人类学家那样的调查者会去到消费者的家中或者办公室，并且通过非定向的方式进行观察和聆听。在实地考察的阶段，我们通常会着眼于几个关键的方面。首先，设计团队会对与调查内容相关的行为进行观察，比如说，如果一个团队对牙膏感兴趣，那么他们就会关注和口腔卫生相关的一些信息。他们会采访许多背景各不相同的使用者们。我们一般会建议大家在选择采访对象时，尽量保证采访对象中有三分之一的人是喜欢在这个领域进行新尝试的，比如还是以口腔卫生为例，我们选的采访对象通常会使用最新科技的电动牙刷或者他们会尝试非常多不同的口腔产品。

The next third should be on the oppositeend of the spectrum. These are people who are resistant to new products, andthey may even exhibit problematic behaviors. These might be people who stilluse the simplest kind of toothbrush or don't brush their teeth very often at all.Or they may use the same brand that they started using many, many years ago. Orthey might be people who don't own any other kind of oral product in additionto their toothbrush.

而接下来三分之一的被调查者则需要是完全相反的一类人，他们通常会拒绝使用新产品，甚至可能有一些不正确的行为，比如说，他们可能还在用最简单老式的牙刷或者他们不经常刷牙，他们有可能很长时间以来只使用一个品牌的产品，或者他们可能除了牙刷之外，没有使用其他任何口腔产品。

The last third should be somewhere inbetween these two extremes. These are people who are open to adopting some newsolutions and resistant to adopting others. Most of us fit into this category.These are pretty average consumers. In human-centered design, we also interviewanother type of person, and these are experts. Experts in the problem space canadd in-depth technical information. If we continue with our example of oralhygiene, this might include dentists, orthodontists, or dental insuranceproviders. It may even include a manufacturing company that makes dentalproducts for a number of different companies.

最后剩下的这三分之一的人，应该介于前两种人之间。他们能够接受一些新产品，但却可能会拒绝尝试另一些产品，我们中大部分人可能就是这样的。这部分人属于常规的消费者，除此之外，我们在以人为本的设计过程中，还需要采访另一类人，那就是专家。特定问题领域的专家通常能够为我们提供一些很有专业深度的技术类信息。我继续以口腔卫生为例，这个领域的专家包括了牙医、正畸医师以及牙科保险人员，或者我们还可以去采访为牙科公司提供牙科产品的制造商。

Designers use human-centered design toput themselves into the situation of the users, to allow them to betterunderstand the user perspective, and to overcome their own existing biases,like the example I gave about our work in Cape Town. In addition toobservations and interviews, human-centered designers use other methods togather data. One such method is a group interview, which is similar to what youmight otherwise call a focus group. Another method is a diary study, and thisis where users track daily information. You might recall our example earlier ofTeresa Amabile's famous diary study on the social context of creative work asan example. And another method is photographing or taking a video of spaces,and that helps us connect the visual context with what people say and do. Asone member from our own research described, you get so in depth. You're likeliving in this space with your team. You kind of have to live that product orwhatever you're designing for many weeks.

通过采用以人为本的设计方法，设计师们能够将自己带入到用户的生活中，并且能更好地从用户的角度思考，打破自己现有的偏见，在刚才给大家分享的故事中，我和我在开普敦的团队就是一个很好的例子。除了进行观察和采访之外，以人为本的设计师们还会通过其他途径收集数据。比如进行小组座谈，也就是我们所说的焦点小组（focus group）。另一个方法就是进行日记研究，这种方法可以记录用户的日常信息，可能你还有印象，我在之前和大家提到过特蕾莎·阿马比尔，她就是通过日记研究方法去进行创意工作的社会背景调查的。除此之外，我们还可以在不同场所进行拍照或者录像，这也能很好地帮助我们将人们的言行和视觉环境联系起来，让你和你的团队产生置身其中的感觉。总而言之，在实地考察的好几周内，你需要通过各种方法设身处地的体验自己的产品。

In 1994, when Procter and Gamble wantedto invent a new cleaning tool, they turned to these methods. While they didn'twork with IDEO, they worked with one of IDEO's biggest competitors calledContinuum. Continuum also uses human-centered design methods. Procter andGamble, or P&G, wanted to revamp their cleaning. At the time, P&G'sline of floor cleaning products consisted of various mop and bucket detergents,and it had changed very little in decades. The Continuum and P&G teamconducted ethnographic fieldwork. They watched their potential users clean thefloor, and they had them walk the designers through their process of cleaningthe floor. Through their fieldwork, they were able to pinpoint the customerpain points in the mopping process. One pain point was that it took a lotlonger than it should have. Another was that it was a messy process. Another isthat it's heavy to move a bucket full of water around. And overall, it requireda lot of steps that people didn't seem to mentally account for.

现在，我来给大家分享另一个故事。在1994年，宝洁公司（Procter and Gamble）想要生产一种新的清洁工具，他们就采用了我刚才给大家讲的那些方法，尽管他们并没有和IDEO公司合作。相反，他们选择了IDEO最大的竞争对手之一，Continuum公司。Continuum同样采用的是以人为本的设计方法。宝洁公司想要更新他们的清洁产品。在那个时候，宝洁的地板清洁系列产品是由很多种拖把和桶装清洁剂组成的，而且在过去的几十年里，这些产品几乎完全没变过。为了更好地完成任务，Continuum和宝洁的设计团队用人类学的研究方法进行了一次的实地考察。他们对潜在用户的地板清洁过程进行了观察，并且带着设计师们一起试验了这样的清洁方式。在实地考察的过程中，他们发现了几个拖地过程中的用户痛点。其中一个用户痛点是，大家拖地的时间往往比想象中更长。另一个用户痛点是拖地程序太复杂了，除此之外，用户还需要提着装满水的水桶在屋里走来走去，非常费劲。因此总体来说，现有清洁工具的最大的问题就是拖地过程中步骤太多，而且人们似乎没有意识到这一点。

The team observed that people changedinto old clothes beforehand in anticipation of the messy task ahead. Then theyswept the floors with a broom and a dustpan. And once they finally got to workon the actual mopping part, people spent just as much time and effort wringingout their mops as they did on cleaning the floors.

Continuum和宝洁的设计小组发现，由于清洁地板的整个过程十分麻烦，人们常常会在开始打扫之前先换上一身旧衣服，接着他们就会开始扫地，等他们终于进入最后的拖地环节时，他们往往还需要花费和拖地同样长的时间来冲洗拖把。

In one instance, the team observed awoman with an innovative cleaning work around. She wrapped paper towels arounda broom so that she could dispose of the dirty parts that touched the floor andkeep her tools and her hands clean. When the team synthesized the insights fromtheir field work, the data showed that people needed an easier and fastersolution for this universal task of cleaning the floor. When P&G originallywent to Continuum for help, they were focused on making better cleaningdetergents, but when they listen to their customers using a human-centereddesign process, they realized that what they really needed to do was reinventthe way we mop. If you haven't already guessed it, the product that came out ofthis research was the Swiffer, one of P&G's most successful products todate. This product generates five hundred million U.S. dollars in sales everyyear. The Swiffer is a great example of the power of the human-centered designmethodology. If it is done right, there's a higher chance of market successbecause you've kept the people you're looking to serve at the center of theprocess. Using this method makes it a lot easier to identify and reduce themarket risk of our ideas. In the next lesson, we'll learn how field work helpsyou to identify consumer pain points and under-serve needs, much like ourexample of Swiffer.

在实地考察过程中，这个设计团队发现，一位女性采用了一种非常创新的清洁方式。在扫地时，她在扫把头上包了一层纸巾，这样她就可以直接扔掉扫地弄脏的部分，避免弄脏清洁工具和自己的手了。当这个设计团队开始总结他们在实地考察过程中的观察时，他们发现，人们非常需要一种更简单快捷的方法来完成日常的地板清洁工作。一开始，宝洁公司其实只是想让Continuum帮他们设计一种更好的清洁剂，但是在以人为本的设计过程中，他们通过聆听自己用户的需求，最终发现，自己真正需要做的是重新发明一种新的拖地。讲到这里，你可能已经猜到了，在这一次的调查之后，宝洁发明出了有名的Swiffer拖把，这也是宝洁公司到目前为止最成功的产品之一，每一年，这个拖把都能获得5亿美元的销售额。Swiffer拖把的例子很好地展现了以人为本设计方法的优势，如果你能够正确使用这个方法，那么你在将来也一定会拥有更高的市场成功率，因为你在设计过程中是将自己的服务对象放在第一位的。通过使用这种方法，我们能够更轻松地发现并且降低创意的市场风险。在下一节课中，我会和大家一起学习更多从Swiffer拖把事例中得到的启发，学习实地考察是如何帮助我们发现用户痛点和服务缺陷的。谢谢你们的收听，这节课我就讲到这里，我们下期再见。