Emotions Matter: User Empathy in the Product Development Process

The reason why some products get intimately linked with people's lives, while others do not, remains a mystery to most consumer products researchers and designers. A shift in thinking from a focus on the rational to the more emotional domains will help us to understand those uniquely human traits that are responsible for people's liking, using, and wanting to live with the products we design. The gap in the methods and tools available to product development researchers and practitioners is centered upon the emotional domain. This gap exists throughout most of the product development process, both for generative as well as evaluative research. We propose that researchers and practitioners working on product development teams attend to improving their ability to recognize and address the feelings of product users—in particular, the feelings that users have about owning and using products. The success of such products in the future will depend upon the degree to which we learn how to empathize with the product users very early in the product development process.