{24} Empathy Gap, Gelato & Work Events
Featuring Dr. Pete Meyers, Emma Dawson, Gelato, The Sample, and Adam Grant
Design: Empathy Gap
Dr. Pete Meyers
The empathy gap is an important concept related to UX design that doesn’t get enough attention. When I search “empathy gap ux” in Twitter, here is one of the few relevant tweets from Dr. Pete Meyers. It’s from 2018!
Designers tend to use more informal language to describe the concept. You can probably find 5k tweets daily about people saying, “talk to your users”. That is essentially saying, “gather more information about your users to help close the empathy gap”. This is good, it’s the foundation for user-centered design (UCD).
The problem that I have with the empathy gap is the underlying assumption that the more empathy, the better. The more pain you feel on behalf of an individual user when they experience friction within your app, the more motivated you are to put on blinders and do whatever it takes to relieve that pain.
There is an opportunity cost to focusing on an individual’s pain.
It forces your team into a reactive mindset that neglects the collective pain. Understanding and addressing the collective pain should be the focal point of a small team with limited time.
To rally around the collective pain, I believe it’s important to do the cliche “talk to your users”. The more information you gather, the more you close the cognitive empathy gap. This means you can think from your user’s perspectives and intellectually understand their problems.
It’s also important to avoid biases created by closing the affective empathy gap. It’s ok to feel an individual user’s pain. But it’s a good practice to put a little time between feeling the pain and reacting to it, even if it’s only a few hours. This allows you to step back and think more rationally about how you are investing your time.
Being rational instead of emotional doesn’t mean you shouldn’t communicate with compassion. Be open and honest and say, “I feel your pain. A fix is realistically at least a few months away. Here is a hack you might consider…”
Frontend: Description Lists
Emma Dawson
Semantic markup goes beyond organization and style, it lends context to your content. The next time you define a term in your content, consider going beyond basic <div> and <p> tags. My preference would probably be the <dfn>, <dl>, <dd>, and <dt> tags.
I do wish browsers would have created a different convention for definitions. More verbose tags would be more intuitive than acronyms. The role=term or role=definition is more verbose but less clean. 😭
Backend: Gelato
Gelato
This is an exciting development in web3 land! The ability to create decentralized cloud functions should open the door for new use cases.
My first thought is wondering if this might be compatible with oracles to trigger contracts based on off-chain events. Clicking the discover tab on Gelato brings up a lot of functions with oracle in the name, so I assume this is useful for oracles.
Here is a more in-depth description of what Gelato is, along with documentation.
Marketing: The Sample
The Sample
As an indie writer, I want to make my content discoverable without shoving it down people’s throats via spam. So the concept of The Sample resonates with me. I can focus on content while they match up my words with readers.
I just integrated their app, so we’ll see how it works. I may post a follow-up with my thoughts on their analytics and overall service soon. 🖖
Team: Work Events
Adam Grant
I completely agree with Adam. The relationship between an employee and a company is often unhealthy. Companies should not act as if paying a salary means they own the time of their employees and can use it at their discretion. That setup is oppressive and should inspire quiet quitting.
The goal should be to create more of a partnership based on respect and aligned interests. A relationship based on respect does not involve unilateral decisions that create obligations. People should be trusted to act on behalf of the company, not forced to do so. Dinners, meetings, and everything in between should be 100% optional.