Empathy in graphic design

"There is a great misconception in this era of graphic design that it is a medium of self-expression."

- Peter Saville quoted in (Millman, D. 2007, How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer, Allworth Press, UK. p23)

Good graphic design is not there for itself - a graphic designer's job is to present the given information or message in the most effective manner possible. To do this a graphic designer needs to empathise with the client as well as with the intended audience. Graphic designers need to get into their client's head space: Who are they? How do they feel about the message? What are they trying to say? What is the deeper meaning of this content or this brand? A good graphic designer will empathise like this with their client, asking the right questions to find this out. There is no use getting a brief and creating a solution without this design thinking process.

During the design process, it is necessary to contantly refer back to this empathy and check whether the work fits with what the client needs and wants. Without this, you are likely to end up with mixed messages, inappropriate presentations of information, or simply a design the client hates. Empathy is necessary not only for the purpose of creating the best work possible; if you create something without empathising with the client, you are wasting your time and theirs.

The client is the first step in the empathy process a good graphic designer goes through. The second is the intended audience. Graphic design is almost always for an audience. Design that has not put enough thought into the people who going to use it is design that fails. Think about the audience, and find out, using market research, who are they? How do they live? What do they like? What do they need? What do they recognise?

A case study for successfully empathetic design is the Apple MacBook Air. I could take any recent Apple product as an example, but for this purpose I chose just one. The user interface in the Snow Leopard operating system seems incredibly intuitive, and is often described as so (1) (2). And in fact, they advertise it as so (3). What this really means though, is that incredible amounts of thought have gone into empathising with the users. Several features of the hardware show this and the attention to detail they pay. The MacBook Air has a magnetic power cord connection, because they have asked themselves how people use a laptop and understood that people dont only use laptops on desks. Real people use them on the floor, in bed, on the couch, and the designers have realised that invariably, someone is going to trip over the power cord at one point or another. In other computers, this meant a frayed or bent charger connection, possibly a computer being jerked onto the floor, and definitely a peeved off computer owner. The magnetic connection stays on when it needs to, and comes off when it needs to too.

When something seems such a simple yet perfect solution, the designer has empathised, and that is where the genius lies. Think about who you are designing for, get into their heads and hearts, and really empathise with them.