Here you will find the full collection of available tools for the empathetic engineer. You can explore and download individual tools, download a whole stage of tools or use the online whiteboard version of them (on ‘Miro’). Use them as you wish or investigate how they fit within a more systematic process by exploring the design process section.
Find ways that your practice and project can connect to larger movements that are working to solve the world's biggest issues.
Organise your ideas and plan your research according to key questions.
Identify all relevant stakeholders involved in your product or service.
Create a story of the key stages a user goes through as they engage with a product, service or problem. Review key interactions and their emotional implications to identify pain points and opportunities.
Map out connections between all actors and components involved in your project in order to understand the key dynamics of your issue, your product or service and if there are any gaps or opportunities.
Gather unbiased data about repetitive behaviours in a user's life by providing them with the material to monitor and relay specific information over a predetermined period of time.
Understand your product or service’s position within the market. Label each axis with a significant attribute and map your competitors against them.
Create a fictional character based on your research that represents a particular type of person who might use your product or service.
Immerse yourself in the lives of your users and their environment to gain a deep understanding of their daily lives and uncover their challenges and motivations, and opportunities for intervention.
An environment persona is a personification of the environment in which you are operating to draw focus and encourage empathy beyond a purely human-centric approach.
In one sentence, explain what it is you aim to achieve by describing the space of opportunity in which you could act, who you are intending to act on or with and why you are trying to do that. Use this structure to help.
Reframe your insights and issues as opportunities using the 'How might we...' question structure. Then play with these strategies to explore opportunities.
Prioritise your strategies based on the success criteria that are most relevant to your project. Label each axes with your own criteria and then arrange your concepts to prioritise.
Understand what your customer or user is trying to accomplish in order to design an appropriate solution for them. Complete the top boxes as complete sentences, then identify pains and gains.
Measure the relevance of your actions against the long term goals of your project. Use this tool to be aware of and manage any assumptions / risks that may hinder you from achieving the desired impact.
Understand your user’s needs by empathising with them to identify their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Identify the potential risks associated with your product or service and plan mitigation strategies.
Create an artificial 'headline' story for a newspaper. Imagine and test how your concept could be portrayed and understood by a broad audience, helping you to understand the key value of the concept.
Get into character and act out someone's journey of using your product or service as a way to quickly test your idea and gather feedback.
Rapid Prototypes
Diverge your thinking to rapidly generate as many ideas as you can without any constraints.
Crazy 8s & Brainstorming
Visualise a story of how your idea would work from start to finish using fast, low-fidelity sketches. Draw your user's story in the frames below.
Prioritise your concepts. Arrange the concepts on the graph based on how likely they are to occur and what impact they may have on users.
Imagine how an alternative organisation or person from outside your domain would approach your issue. Define the issue you hope to solve, select alternative people and then ask 'What would they do?'
Represent how a digital interaction might work by creating low fidelity prototypes of how they might look.
Consider the different ways solutions could be configured around multiple stakeholders by focussing on one user's needs and then exploring who else could benefit. This helps you to create ideas with new systems and business models.
Capture your concept by formulating a name tagline and key image and then defining the concept's key features.
Measure your product / service offering against user jobs, pains and gains by visualising the value you create.
Think beyond products by understanding the complex value networks around your creations using paper cutouts. Use them to establish relationships between different people, channels and touch-points.
Detail the stages of the product and the experience surrounding it in order to communicate, collaborate, investigate refine and plan the implementation of the service. Map all stages horizontally and all actors (including non human actors) vertically.
Assess what assumptions you are making with your concept and which to test first so you can minimise the risk of investment and move quicker. Learn by failing fast and adapting.
Identify what’s most important for your users by arranging visual cards based on priorities
Plan experiments to test your concepts and reduce the risk of pursuing concepts that may not work. Use one column for each of your critical assumptions.
Design your business model for environmental sustainability by organising all aspects into easily-understood segments that focus on operating responsibly while also identifying how your idea creates, delivers, and captures value.
Measure the relevance of your actions against the long term goals of your project. Use this tool to be aware of and manage any assumptions / risks that may hinder you from achieving the desired impact.
Design your business model by organising all aspects into easily-understood segments in order to identify how your idea creates, delivers, and captures value.
