Charlie Gedeon sits before a middle-aged man, opens his notebook and clicks his pen. He places an audio device in front of his subject and hits record. This interview is the first of many he will conduct for his latest project. But Gedeon isn’t a journalist. He’s a user experience (UX) designer set to develop a new medical app that monitors chronic kidney disease, which affects one in ten Canadians, and he’s speaking with patients to guide his work.
“I try to start at a bird's-eye view and build an image of the person’s life and goals, which have nothing to do with the app,” explains Gedeon, the co-founder of Pragmatics Studio, a design firm based in Montreal. “Apps are only a means to an end for a goal that someone is trying to achieve.”
Understanding the motivations and aspirations of users is a challenge for the world's UX professionals, a community estimated at one million in 2017. Through methods like user interviews, they attempt to understand the experience of others—or employ empathy—to deliver solution-focused products.
The medical app Gedeon worked on encourages users to input biomarkers to monitor their chronic kidney disease (CKD). His user interviews revealed that diagnosed patients struggled to keep pace with their treatment plan since it requires daily vigilance in managing diet, medication, and health metrics. In response to this finding, Gedeon and his team tweaked the app’s design. They shifted from an educational model where users scour for information to guide their daily treatment, to one that provides clear instruction about the biomarkers they need to measure, like blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
This modification was rooted in the user-centred approach known as empathetic design.
“Kidney disease impacts their life, but they’re not defined by it,” notes Gedeon. “We needed to respect their time, so we decided to approach it like it’s one of the other tasks in their day, just like buying bread and checking it off their list.”
The World Health Organization estimates that in developed countries, just 50 per cent of patients with chronic diseases, including CKD, adhere to their treatment plans. During his interviews for the app, Gedeon met a patient who was successful in combatting this rate by using paper and phone reminders. This insight led Gedeon and his team to consider gamifying the user’s experience in the form of a to-do list that delivers positive reinforcement upon completing each task.
“Our job is to take the pains, but also sometimes take the things that are super insightful,” notes Gedeon. “Rather than empathizing with someone’s pain, we can flip the interview and think of the user as an expert, and that could inspire our solution.”
Medical app display
One of the pitfalls plaguing junior professionals is forming such a close emotional attachment to their design solution that they ignore how it makes the user feel. Gedeon says apps that neglect empathetic microcopy could run the risk of alienating users. For instance, when a fitness app user falls just shy of their 10,000 daily step goal, the terminology used to notify them can affect their experience and mood. If they receive a message saying “You had a 10,000-step goal and got 8,000 steps. Studies show that any movement is beneficial, so keep going!” it can keep them much more emotionally connected to the app and their goal than the message “You failed to reach your goal.”
“Empathetic microcopy makes a world of difference,” notes Gedeon. “That’s one of the small things in UX that doesn’t require some elaborate redesign to make an app that’s genuinely impactful.”
Introduced in 1999 and continuously refined, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of international technical standards that encourage organizations to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Though they aren't laws. Gedeon says the absence of formal policy forces accessible design to rely on empathy rather than legislated guidelines.
UX designer Charlie Gedeon
“There's a point where empathy isn't enough,” Gedeon says. “The CEO isn’t going to empathize with a 0.01 per cent blind population. It’s a matter of policy, and the government needs to step up and mandate it like it has for newsletter opt-outs.”
Gedeon says that even when accessibility features are incorporated into apps, they’re often neglected until second or third iterations.
“That shouldn’t be the benchmark for society,” Gedeon says. “You would never put a curb cut because there aren’t enough people in wheelchairs. That’s just a ridiculous way to think on an urban planning level because we don’t think of cities as profit centres, but we do think of apps as such.”
While exercising empathy on a case-by-case basis can provide immediate relief to real-time UX problems, adopting it as a lens can spark proactive solutions for issues that have yet to arise.
“It’s not just about seeing a problem and trying to fix it,” Gedeon explains. “It’s about having a vision for the future that we want that isn’t based on what the average person thinks is a pain they need fixed tomorrow. It’s considering empathy on a macro level, like, ‘Couldn’t life be better if...?’”
Gedeon says that by applying empathy as perspective rather than a tool, UX professionals can deliver designs that connect with broader audiences.
“It’s about embodying that mindset by not making empathy a checklist item that you tick off, but rather part of the fabric of the way we operate.”
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