Gerald Ajam

“Empathy is user research”

Empathy motivates research. It does not replace observation.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All the claims I’m unconvinced byDesign

Usually said

“Empathy is user research”

The shift

From: Imagining the user

To: Observing the user

More precisely

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.

In short

Caring about users is a good start. It makes a team want to find out more. But imagining someone’s situation is a guess, and guesses tend to resemble the people making them. Research is what turns that care into knowledge.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. So, more precisely

    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.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

Empathy is a reason to do user research1, and the research is the observation of what people actually do2, in context3, across more than the people who came forward4.

  1. A reason to do user research

    Empathy supplies the motive and the questions. The answers still have to come from outside the team.

  2. What people actually do

    Observed behaviour, which often differs from what people say they do, and from the reasons they give for it.

  3. In context

    Where and when the thing is really used, with the interruptions, workarounds and time pressure that a meeting room removes.

  4. More than the people who came forward

    Volunteers are usually the keen and the confident. The users a product fails tend to be the ones who did not volunteer.

What it changes in practice

  • Write down what the team assumes about its users, then go and check each assumption.
  • Keep notes of what was observed apart from what the team thinks it means.
  • Recruit beyond the enthusiasts, including people who stopped using the product.

A case, in general terms

A team designing a tool for part-time students runs an empathy workshop and concludes that these students want more flexibility. When the team shadows a handful of students, it finds the real problem: deadlines clash with shift rotas published only a week ahead. The workshop produced a feeling. The observation produced a specific problem the team could solve.

Singapore