Gerald Ajam

Explore / Counterposition

“Empathy is user research”

Empathy motivates research. It does not replace observation.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All counterpositions

The strongest formulation

Designers who care about the people they design for ask better questions and notice more. Empathy keeps the user present in decisions that would otherwise be made for the organisation’s convenience.

Why it is attractive

It is quick, it feels virtuous and it needs no recruitment. A team that has imagined the user’s day believes it has understood it.

Where it holds

It holds as a disposition: the willingness to take someone else’s situation seriously and to go and look at it. That is a good reason to do research.

Where it breaks

It breaks when feeling stands in for finding out. Imagined users resemble the team, vivid cases crowd out typical ones, and what people say they do differs from what they do.

What evidence matters

Nisbett and Wilson (1977) on how poorly people report the reasons for their own behaviour, and Bloom (2016) on empathy as a spotlight that favours the near and the similar. What matters is observed behaviour in context, from a sample that reaches beyond the enthusiasts, with observation kept separate from interpretation.

More precisely

A more precise version

Empathy is a reason to do user research, and the research is the observation of what people actually do, in context, across more than the people who came forward.

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