Which of the four components is most important to create empathetic UX design?

Episode Transcript

Moderator:  Welcome to One Question with UpTop Health. Our question today is which of the four components is most important to create empathetic UX design? And Michael could you go first, please?

Michael: Yes, sure John. Just to remind, the four components of empathetic UX design are visual design, transparency, content and social proof. All of these are important in building empathy and establishing trust. However, if you have to start with one arguably, I would have to say it would be visual design. I’m not choosing this category because it’s the most important, but naturally it is the first thing that we see as humans and react to when looking at a web experience. And again by visual design I’m speaking broadly in terms of brand, UI, layout and really summing that up as how professional does a digital experience look?

Think about when people visit a website for the first time, there’s about a 5 second test. You guys may have heard about a five second test that the site must answer. “Am I at the right place? Is this site legitimate and does it look trustworthy?” In that five seconds, what you’ll be doing as a user is scanning the page for visual cues that might help you answer these questions and those visual cues could include visual polish, scanning headlines and text, imagery. We work really hard on that first impression.

If we’re speaking of a website, for example, to get consumers to sign up for medical insurance, this is extremely important because a customer may look elsewhere if those boxes aren’t checked. Now, if we’re speaking of a member portal as an example after a customer has signed up it’s not as easy for them to just turn away at that point. But building trust and engagement with that customer is important throughout the terms of that relationship. If you do this well, you’ll build loyalty along the way and eventually retention.

Just to wrap up, going back to visual as the first thing to consider because of all the things that I mentioned, once a user checks that box, they quickly move on to that next categories that I mentioned earlier; content, transparency, and social proof. That’s when the user will actually dig deeper into your website and start to read things. So that’s that’s my feeling on that. Craig, do you have any thoughts?

Craig: The only thought I have, obviously because Mike heads up our design and strategy with our clients, is it all really comes back to understanding who the users are and what they’re trying to do. When I say understand who they are and what they’re trying to do, it’s also understanding what obstacles they may have. So accessibility, being mindful of how you treat the color, how you treat the font, how you treat the size of the buttons in the controls. Especially in a mobile screen layout, things like that are all part of empathy, being able to understand it from the other person’s perspective or walk a mile in their shoes if you will. That’s the only thing I wanted to add; don’t just look at the visual aesthetics of the design but really make sure that it’s mapping to the end users perspective and what they’re going through in the context of interacting with your website, portal or app. So that’s all I would have to add.

Moderator: Thanks guys.

Craig: All right. Thank you.