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Transcription
Empathising with Stakeholders
You know I am very much spoke about empathy and the importance of empathy in the design thinking process and
now, empathy is putting yourself in the in the shoes of the user and then experiencing what the user would
experience, learning from it, taxonomising and sharing that data with your team. Empathy is ability to put oneself in
another's shoes.
It might look quite obvious. What's a big deal, anyone can empathise, but it's not so easy. You would be surprised
how hard it is to experience the pain, emotion, helplessness of an individual, and so it's very important to learn the
ability to empathise and empathy is an important aspect of design thinking. Typical elements of empathy are
understand their feelings. Go through the process that person is going through.
Put yourself in the same mindset. See the world from their eyes, appreciate what they are doing, learn from it and
communicate whatever you have seen in writing, in words to the users and also to your designers. That in a nutshell
was empathy process is all about.
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Now, people tend to confuse empathy with sympathy. Empathy is more detailed. It's about putting yourself in the
shoes. Well, sympathy is simply knowing the person, knowing the problem the person is facing and then extending
your solidarity. It is not putting yourself in that person's shoes. It is just extending the solidarity, it just knowing the
problem that the person is facing and extending solidarity.
It is not putting yourself in the person's shoes experiencing that problem, writing it down, taxonomising and sharing
that information with your designers, with your team and then coming up with something that is better, that
addresses that problem, that addresses that the problem that user is facing its. So, it's one has to be clear between
empathy and sympathy.
My question to you is why empathy is so rare. In fact, there is an interesting research paper on compassion and
there are multiple papers on empathy and how empathy drives leadership, how empathy drives creativity,
entrepreneurship. And you'll be surprised that it's, although it looks quite trivial, when you hear: oh empathy,
anyone can learn empathy, it is not so easy.
And it's not so widely shared trait, and so my question to you is why empathy is so-so rare? Please take few
moments and try to think why empathy is so rare?
So, I would ask you, urge you to please think about the benefits of empathy, think about how does it help. Now, it
might seem quite selfish, when I say that putting yourself in the user's shoes and understanding the problem and
then bringing that knowledge on the design table. That is that basically means I'm trying to teach you to use an
individual's problem for your own benefit.
Well, I'm sorry. This is not what I want to tell you. All I want to say is that you can use empathy as a way to learn
users and then design services that help the users. I don't want to say that use empathy and take benefits from the
problems of the people, but empathise with the people, learn from the people and then help the people out in
addressing their problems, not to take benefits out of them.
If that is the case, then I think, you will never be true to yourself. It's very important to be true to yourself. Anything
that is mechanical that is highly processed, may not yield the results that you expect that to yield. So clearly, I do not
want you to use empathy as a business proposition, but rather you use empathy to help people, and if that is the
motto you can certainly succeed in empathising with people.
My next question is: why is empathy important for design? It is important because it helps you understand the users.
But think again how empathy helps in design, think about it, spend some moments. Think about it.
You know, use a whiteboard, write the word empathy, write the word design and say: how does empathy leads to
better design? Think about it and why empathy is so important in business? Now, that is a very-very different
question from what we are studying right now, but clearly, why is empathy so important in business?
Well, there are a lot of studies and most studies are on the way out that links empathy, leadership and business
performance. So, leaders who are high on empathy tend to perform extremely well in business. If you look at the
performance of Apple, it is very much said that the top leadership of Apple have a strong empathy for end users and
therefore they are able to develop better products, and there are many other insights where empathy has led to
better corporate performance.
Many of the Scandinavian countries tend to have empathy both for their employees and also for the end users, and
they have performed fairly well in business compared to similarly placed ranked American corporations and
Scandinavian business example is extremely good to understand the meaning of empathy in business and how it
leads to better business performance. Three steps to empathise: observe, engage and immerse.

Observe, so you really go out and understand what are users doing? Why are users doing? How are users doing, for
whom users are doing? How are they doing? What are they interacting with? It's all about, is all our elements of
observation. Once you observe, you take notes, you formulate questions, and then you engage with the users.
You interview the users, both impromptu or you can schedule interview, develop right questions beforehand, while
you're observing and then ask the right questions. Ask open or close-ended questions and then get more
information about user's attitude towards a given design, issue or design problem.
Finally, immerse yourself with the users, put yourself in the users, follow the users, do the same thing that the users
are doing to better understand the context and the user problems, and all these three things will help you learn to
empathise, learn to understand the problem and make you a better design thinker that would help you develop
solutions to a given problem.
If you ever travelled abroad, you will know the value of a map. In a place where you don't speak the language, you
don't know the people or the places, a map comes in really handy to get you from point A to point B. That's the same
thing that we do in design thinking.
The first step is to create a stakeholder map. You'll always have two types of stakeholders when you're trying to
solve a problem. An internal stakeholder map, which deals with all the people who are internal to your organisation.
These are people who will directly or indirectly affect the creation of the solution.
The second type of stakeholder that you will have is the external stakeholder. These are all of the people who will be
the end users of your solution. Again, these might be direct users or indirect users. It helps to have a stakeholder
map for both of them. Let's start off by creating an internal stakeholder map. We are going to use the Bajaj
electricals limited water heater problem to create this map.
Let's start off by creating the internal stakeholder map for the Bajaj electricals limited water heater project. The first
thing to do when working on a stakeholder map is to identify all of the stakeholders. Remember, look at all of the
direct stakeholders. These are the people who will be working on the problem within the company, hands-on. But
also think hard about the indirect stakeholders. These are the people who can make or break the project. So, let's
start off in no particular order by looking at all of the stakeholders that we identified. The first one obviously was the
CEO of the company.
This is the person who had a lot riding on the project. They're directly responsible for the performance of the
company, performance of new launches, the budgets, the team allocations, all of that. The CEO is a very important
indirect stakeholder in almost any project that you'll be working on. The next person for this particular project was
the sales set.
This stakeholder was very important because they are the ones who are finally responsible for the volume sales. So,
deciding on the pricing, deciding on the markets to launch this product and all of this would finally come down to the
approval of the sales head. So again, indirect stakeholder. The category heads. This is the person who would have
the maximum amount of knowledge about the category.
So, talking to this person, getting their inputs in would have been very important for us. Again, this is the indirect
stakeholder. The consumer insights manager, most FMCG, FMCD companies have this specific role within the
company. And this is the person who's responsible for all of the research that gets conducted by the company. They
have very important insights and a huge knowledge database.
The next person, the regional sales managers. These are the people who are responsible for different regions. They
are the ones who can give you first-hand knowledge about how consumers behave, how different markets behave,
what kind of products work when and where. Again, important stakeholder, but indirect.
The production procurement head, different companies would have different titles for this, but this is a person
who's finally responsible for how the production of certain things get done. Do you outsource all of the parts
procurement? Do you create things in-house, all of these decisions finally rest on this person.

The CFO, this is a person who finally signs off on budgets. For a new product that you want to create and launch, it's
very important to have the support from a role that's going to influence all of the finances for the project. Now let's
look at some of the more directly involved stakeholders, the R and D team. Because this was a product that was
going to be very strongly driven by technology and IOT, the R&D team was going to work on this project hands-on
and they were a very important stakeholder for us.
The chief technology officer, or the CTO. Again, for any technology product, this is the person who's invested heavily
in the project and is the critical stakeholder who will work with you hands-on. The product designer, this is a role in a
company, where this person finally decides how the product looks, how it behaves, what's the UX of the product. So,
this person was part of the core team working on the project.
The after-sales team. A large part of the experience for products or services in the market today is what happens
after the sale. How is customer support delivered? What happens for a technology product when the customer can't
understand how to operate it, or it faces technical issues.
So, a very important stakeholder again, directly involved in the creation of this product. The quality assurance team.
For a water heater, most families in India will end up buying this product once, for the next four to five years. And
they will only tend to replace this product. It's not a fashion item, which you kind of upgrade every now and then. So,
it's very important that the quality is of the highest standard. And for a product that was supposed to become the
hero product, this team became even more important.

The marketing teams. For a product where we were trying to create a totally new revolutionary way of approaching
the category, the marketing team would have had a major role to play at the post-launch stage of the products. They
were involved in this, right from the start.
The distribution team, very, very important. A lot of times the distribution side of things get ignored, but they are
the ones who can really influence where your product is available. How do people buy it? Is it only online? Is it
offline? How will you reach out to people in smaller cities of India? So, this team, again, was a very critical
stakeholder.
Now that you've identified all of the different internal stakeholders, the next thing to do is plot out the actual
internal stakeholder map. Think of the map, three concentric circles. The inner most circle is the core team that is
working directly on the project and creating the solution. The next outer circle, all of the strong influences that will
affect the working of the core team.
And the outermost circle are the indirect stakeholders, who are not working on the project hands-on, but their
opinions, their reviews, their inputs are very, very strong for the success of this project. Let's start plotting out the
internal stakeholder map, starting off with the inner most circle and then moving outwards.
The product designer, the R and D team and the consumer insights manager. These were the three different roles or
stakeholders that were involved in this project as the core team.

The chief technology officer, the quality assurance team, the regional sales manager, the production procurement
heads, the after sales team and the category head, all of these people were involved in this project, but they kept
moving in and out.
So, the quality assurance team was approached to give us inputs on what works, what does not work for a product
of this sort. The regional sales manager, all had inputs to give about how different consumers in different markets
behave. The category head was very, very important to set context right at the start of the project. And the after
sales team was instrumental in deciding on how can a new technology product be serviced once it is sold to the
customer.
Let's move on to the outermost circle. These were very strong influencers who were kept in the loop throughout the
working of the project. The CEO kept coming in and out of the project because their reviews and their inputs were
needed at different stages.
The marketing team got involved hands on in the project after the initial phase was complete. The chief financial
officer was again keeping an overview on the project. And is it on track or not in terms of budgets. The sales head
played a strong role in deciding on what kind of pricing works? What are the sales volume that we should target?
What are the different types of markets? And how those can contribute to the overall sales numbers? And the
distribution team played a strong support role as well. Now that you have all of these mapped out, let's move on and
see how the team actually worked.
Now that we've created the internal stakeholder map of all of the people who'd be involved in the creation of the
solution or the product, let's move on to the external stakeholders. These are the people who would be the final
users of this product. Again, remember, these can be direct users or indirect users.
Let's think of a typical Indian family and identify all of the stakeholders from that. The first person that comes to
mind in an Indian family would be the husband. This is a person who would play a very important role in the
purchase of this product. They would either directly purchase the product, or they would be a very strong influencer.
They would also be a direct user of this product.
The second person in the Indian family that you can think of is the wife. Now, again, they're either the decision
maker along with the husband, or they're a very strong influencer in terms of what needs to get purchased for the
house. What are the requirements? The other important role that a wife plays in an Indian family is that they are the
ones who would become indirect users for the other people like the kids or the elderly family members who do not
operate a geezer directly.

The next stakeholder is the elderly stakeholders or the elderly people in an Indian family. Think of these as
grandmothers, grandfathers, mother-in-laws, father-in-laws, or mothers and fathers of the husband and wife living
along with them.
The kids are a very important stakeholder again. They most often would be indirect stakeholders if they're really
young. If they're teenagers, they would be direct stakeholders and they would use this product directly. The maids in
an Indian family use the product a lot. Most often the water heater tends to get associated with just the bathroom.
But in many Indian families, the water heater is also use for cleaning of the bathrooms, cleaning utensils and other
such purposes.
The retailer is a very strong, indirect stakeholder. They are the ones who influence the final consumer and they are
the ones who become a direct stakeholder when we are trying to sell this product and expose it to the market.
Online reviews, now this is not a typical stakeholder. But forums like Quora or websites like Amazon are where
people base their decisions.
Online reviews are not a real person, but they're a very important stakeholder when it comes to the final user. So,
websites like Amazon or forums like Quora influence the final decision that the buyer of this product makes. So, it's
very important to consider them when you're plotting out an external stakeholder map.
The contractors are typically people like architects, interior designers, plumbers. These are the people who will
influence the buyer of the product because they are the ones who are technical experts. So, if you're redoing your
bathroom and you've got a contractor, who's doing all of the fit-outs, that person is the one that you will obviously
reach out to and talk to before buying a water heater product. So, they become important again.

And friends. These are the people you can consider as your friends outside office or friends in office that you reach
out to and ask for opinions when you're thinking about buying a product of this sort.
Like we did for the internal stakeholder map, now that you have identified all of the different stakeholders, let's plot
them on the map. The map again is three concentric circles that start off with the inner most circle, which is the
most important direct users. In the case of a typical Indian family, the husband and wife is what we consider as the
most important stakeholders as they are the most common users of the product. And they're also the most common
buyers and the strongest influences that affect the buying decision.
If you move on to the next circle, the kids, the maids and the elderly people in the family become extremely
important here because they are the ones who are finally indirectly using this product and will have an opinion to
share with the decision-makers.
And on the outermost circle, this is where sites like Amazon and online reviews come in. The contractor comes in
here, the friends that you reach out to, to ask for their opinion, come in here. And the retailers come in here as well.
This is what an external stakeholder map for Bajaj electricals look like.
Here's an image from the actual design thinking session that was conducted for Bajaj electricals. So, stakeholders are
also referred to as actors in certain processes. Now, if you notice, the way that this was used was that we tried to
think of all different possible external stakeholders that we could think of. And we tried and listed down all of the
different use cases that these actors or stakeholders would use the water heater for.
Once we had a long list ready, the team went in and voted for the most common actors or the most common
stakeholders. And they also looked at extreme users who would become very important for us. More details on this
in the later part of this module.

So, let's discuss how we can we can inculcate elements of empathy in our in our day-to-day life, in our imaginations,
in our creativity. Some of the ways through which we can inculcate empathy in our digital life is we can have
beginner's mindset. Now, why I say so why beginner's mindset is important?
Because usually as we grow old, we develop clusters of our safe zones and we tend to stay in those clusters and
those clusters tend to create strong biases and those biases blur our judgment at times. Well, there is a term in
economics, which we call bounded rationality. We will not get into that territory. But it is possible that those clusters
of safe zones that have a potential to blur our judgment.
Not that it is wrong, but it can certainly also implore or blur our ability to create our ability to question the existing
norms, existing routines and practices. And so it's very important to really have a beginner's mind. Such that when
we see something new and we are trying to create something, we have a bottoms up approach and approach where,
you know, we are not in a box, but we are outside the box.
And we question the fundamental genesis and fundamental assumptions of a given practice routine, product or
service or innovation. That although could be hard, can be extremely enriching and have the potential to lead
towards a fascinating innovations. For example, you know, usually when you go to a public office or a private office,
there's always a queue is a long line of people who have documents who want to be heard by the officials.

Now, this could be a routine, a practice that has not been challenged. You can ask us a lot question why people have
to stand in a queue? Why can't they sit? This might look very-very mundane. I mean, why not stand? Why sit or why
sit? Why not stand? Now that basic practice of standing in a queue to get your job done in a government office can
be challenged through innovation.
And this is what is beginner's mindset to do not believe in a practice, but to challenge your practice and think of
innovation, so how you can reduce a queue in a government office. That's one example. The other example is when
you go to a shoe store, you normally show your feet, so that the person can take the measurement of your feet and
then suggest you a pair of shoes.
Now, think of it. Can you digitalise this? How can you make this whole experience of removing the shoe, getting your
feet measured and then wearing new shoe? How can this experience be improved, be more digitalised, be more
comfortable? Think about it. Can just a size of your feet enough to understand the kind of shoe you want to wear, or
maybe more measures of the feet could be taken?
Maybe a, the shape of the feet could be aching and then a more appropriate type of shoe design could be suggested.
Think about those innovative ways through which you can challenge the existing practices and come up with
something absolutely new and innovative that can improve the user experience. That's a, that's one of the powers
of beginner's mindset.
It's important when you have a beginner's mindset to not judge, you should question everything and question
from beginner's mindset. Question the routines and the practices. Be truly curious. Look at the patterns. Now,
patterns are set practices and set routines. You can look at the patterns and assume, it's a pattern, let it be.
Or you can be outside the box and question a given pattern and say why the pattern is like that. Why cannot we
redesign the pattern and how can we redesign the pattern? That's also a way of having a beginner's mindset. Be like
a child, you know a child questions everything. Child doesn't assume anything.
A child questions everything, he's always asking questions and because the child has a beginner's mindset. Always
start from building blocks, that is from the fundamentals, like a child.

Eliminate should, must and rules. If you're interviewing an individual and the individual uses the words like it should
be done like that it has been happening like that. It's just how we do it. This is what we have been told by our
superiors. Now, these kinds of answers are not to be taken for granted, your role as an empathy researcher is to
question why your superiors told this? Can't it be questioned? Why your superiors asked you to follow the same
routine? Why can't you challenge it?
How can it be challenged? So, it's very important to pick those words that have a element of assumption, there is a
element of routinisation and practices that have no logic or no defined premises. All these look at the assumptions,
the world is based on assumptions. You can always challenge assumptions.
That's what I tell and one of the fundamentals of philosophy of science is you always challenge assumptions.
Because the whole world is based on assumption. You can always challenge them. When you challenge assumptions.
We come up with extremely innovative ideas that are a fascinating, in the case of movie-making, people who
challenge the existing norms come up with excellent ways of telling stories.
Now, here is an image of a ironing table. Now, it's a fairly routinised image of an ironing table. This image has been
so for the last 50 years. Can you redesign this ironing table? Can you make it more comfortable? Now, I give it a
personality. I hate ironing my shirt. It's such a tedious process. Can you redesign this ironing table such that I can iron
my shirt easily?

Can you question the existence of a design of this ironing table and make it more efficient, make it more user
friendly so that t-shirts and shirts and you know trousers can be easily ironed, take less amount of time and is more
efficient. Think about it and when you are done thinking about it, please make a drawing on a white paper. It's very
important to use your hand to draw, to sketch your ideas on white paper.
As we grow unfortunately, we leave the habit of sketching and trust me, when you let your ideas get sketched, you
it's quite therapeutic and you feel that you can do something, you can achieve something. You can turn your
creativity and ideas into reality by just sketching. So, my humble advice to you would be please sketch, sketch your
ideas.
One of the ways through which you can practice empathy is by asking questions what, how and why? Now, what,
how and why questions can be targeted at the assumptions of a given practice, routine, system process. The same
questions can be asked to the user to understand his or her position for a given experience for a given product for a
given service.
These are fundamental questions that can help you understand the user and the practices the user is doing with the
given product, service or process. For instance, you can use questions like of what to observe the user is doing
without making assumptions, so you can really write down what is user doing? What are the things user taking in
order to process an information?
What steps user is taking to process the information? What amount of risk does it take for the user to handle a given
product? What is the fun user get while experiencing a given product? What is the use of this product or a service or
a process? Can this product service or process be made more user friendly, efficient? How can this product service
process be made more friendly and more efficient? Why is the user using this?

Why has he or she never questioned the given practice, product, service, process? Are some of the questions that
you can ask in order to understand the user position for a given interface of a product process or service or a routine
or a practice. One of the best ways to describe a given product process is to use a lot of adjectives. Now, look at this
image and try to describe it.
How would you describe this image? Why I say that is because using the right set of words help you and your team
understand a given situation. Well for sure, a photo is equal into a thousand words, yet words are important to
describe a given situation. How will you describe it? I give an example.
So, if you look at this image, it says chaos, too many people, multiple queues, too many people, few windows of
services, too many people looking at the individual, windows are not high enough. Should there be windows there?
There everyone is standing, no seats for the people. There is a possibility of catastrophe in cases of of Corona. So,
you can really use lot of adjectives, situational parallels to describe this image.
And the more you describe this image, you'll be surprised how many ideas you get to solve this situation. The less
you describe the image, the lesser your ideas will be. The more you describe this image, the more ideas you'll have
to declutter the situation, to find solutions to address the chaos that you see in this picture. And so it's very
important to look at the image and describe it with as many words as possible.

So, my advice would be please take five minutes of break and look at this image and describe it with as many
adjectives and as many two or three words descriptions to describe this image and then reflect back and see when
you're describing this image with words, are you getting ideas? And if we get to meet each other, we'll certainly
discuss your experience while describing these images.
Let's learn to apply empathy via observation by doing a simple exercise. I want you to grab a pen and paper. Now,
take a moment to look at the image on your screen. Usually, we do not take time to just observe people. We
immediately jump to conclusions.
The exercise we're about to do is necessary to suspend any kind of judgment and just observe people. While
observing, our role is to try and understand why someone is doing something in a certain way, and what are they
feeling at that point of time.
From the image that you see, there are just three things that I want you to think about and answer. The first part
that we need to answer is what is the person you're observing doing in the particular situation? The second part that
we need to answer is: how is she doing it, and the third part, why is she doing what she's doing in the way that she's
doing it? Let's go through it one by one.
For what the person is doing, this is an actual image that we looked at when we were doing the observation
exercises for the water heater project. So, in the section here's what we observed, the lady that you see in the image
seems to be waiting for the bucket to fill with water so that she can take a bath. Now, we observe this from the fact
that she's got a towel in her hand and she's staring at the bucket filled with water. The second thing that you
observe is that there's a shower in the bathroom, but the person is still filling a bucket. At this stage, we are not
going to jump to conclusions about why they seem to be do it because we're just observing what this person seems
to be doing. The next thing that we observe is that the water isn't pouring out with a lot of pressure. We also noticed
that there are a few buckets in the bathroom, and the bathroom floor seems to be wet.
Let’s move on to the next part of the exercise. This part deals with how is this person doing what she's doing? Does it
seem to require effort? Does she seem to be rushed? Is she in pain? Is she happy? Is the activity impacting the user
in a positive way or a negative way? Let's try and answer all of these questions. The person seems to look sleepy and
tired. Now, you can't see her face, but this is what we observe via the body language. The bucket seems to be filling
very slowly and the wait may also be making the person feel a little more irritated. Let's move on to the last part of
this observation exercise, which is where you try and guess why the person's doing, what he or she is doing in the
way that she's doing it. So, the first thing, the water pressure may be too less for a shower to work, and hence that
person is filling the bucket with water, which isn't what she had planned, which may also be the cause of irritation,
or the reason why she is looking at the bucket with that sense.
The next thing she seems to have a kid and elders living in the house because you see a small stool there. The stool
usually is used in Indian households for a person to sit down and have a bath. The third thing is that the hot water
may not be readily available. So, in the shower, if you turn the shower on, the hot water, if it's very cold, you don't
get it with a lot of pressure. So that may be one of the reasons why she's filling the bucket with water and the water
pressure seems to be really low. So, usually if the temperature of the water is really cold even if you have a geyser, if
you turn the water on full pressure, the water doesn't come out really hot. That may be the reason why the water is
trickling down, rather than falling out with a lot of pressure.

The last part of this observation exercise is answering the why, why is the user doing what he or she is doing in the
way that they're doing it? This step usually requires that you make informed guesses regarding motivations and
emotions. It's the step where we reveal assumptions that you should ask users about when you do interviews with
them, and it often uncovers unexpected realizations.
Let's go back to the image of the lady in the bathroom. Now here, the first guess that we made is that the water
pressure may actually not be adequate for the shower to work and that's the reason she's forced to have a bath.
Isn't what she had initially planned, which may also be the cause of her irritation. The second thing that we guess is
that this lady may have kids and elders living with her in the household. Now, we derive this conclusion from the fact
that you see the bathroom stool there, but it's usually used in Indian household for somebody to sit down and have
a bath, or somebody will use it to sit on it while she's giving a small child bath. The third thing that we guessed is that
the hot water, even though she's trying to fill the bucket is not hot enough for her to do it quickly and fill the bucket
and have a bath soon. That's the reason she slowed down the water pressure and it's trickling down, which again,
may be causing irritation because she may be getting late for work.
Now, you would have observed that when we went from what to the how to the why, there were a lot of
assumptions that we would have made. I'm hoping that this technique will give you some tips as to how you can
actually derive more meaningful and deeper insights just by a simple observation exercise.
Another ways through which you can practice empathy is the five Whys. Now, what is five whys? Define the
problem. You look at the situation, a practice or a process or a product, and then you ask: why is it happening? Why
is that? Why is that? Why is that? Why is that? That is you dig deeper into problem. Try to look at the assumptions,
because you know, although I say that it's important to challenge the assumptions, you need to know the
assumptions.
What are the assumptions? And so you really need to dig deeper, probe deeper to understand what are the
assumptions? What are the underlying reasons and methods and situations that led to this practice, process,
product, service and routine or a problem in this practice, process, product, service and routine?
And just so five why, is really a method of digging deeper, probing deeper to really understand a. the underlying
assumptions, the underlying philosophy, the underlying reasons of situation or an event that might have triggered a
given practice and then, once you know that there was an underlying event or a situation or an assumption that led

to this practice, routine, product service, you can go forward and challenge it and create something new that can
ameliorate a given a discrepancy in a given routine, practice, situation, product, service or process.
Here's how we applied the five whys technique to the Bajaj water heater project to redefine the initial problem that
we had started the project with.
If you remember, the initial problem definition was Indian consumers do not want to pay for premium features in
water heaters.
Now, we asked ourselves why may this be so? Here's the answer that we came up with, most premium features are
not frequently used and hence don't justify the premium that a user has to pay. We wrote that down and then we
asked ourselves, why would this be happening? Why are most premium features not frequently used?
So, here's what the answer was. Most often in Indian households, the water heater is placed either outside the
bathroom or at us at a height where there's no physical interaction possible with the water heater. It's just that
on/off power supply button that most people tend to interact with. That seemed to make sense, but we kept going.
We asked ourselves, why is this happening? Why are people placing the water heater at a height in the bathroom or
placing it outside? Here's the answer that came up.
Most people see the water heater as a dangerous device. So, they want to minimise any non-critical interaction with
it. This makes sense, but we kept going.
We asked ourselves why do people see the water heater as a dangerous device. Here's the answer.
There's fear in people's mind that extra interaction with the water heater device may actually lead to electric shock
or may cause overheating of the device and explosions. Now, this seemed possible, so we asked ourselves further
that where is this coming from that extra interaction may cause all of this to happen and this is where something
incredible happened.
We actually dug deep into the psychology of most human beings, and we realize that water and electricity mixing
together has always been a dangerous cue in our mind, right from the evolution of human beings, and it has been
subconsciously programmed into our mind that this is not a good thing and is dangerous.
That’s the reason most human beings who are well aware about the technological advancements who are well
aware that the chances of shock are very rare nowadays in products like the water heater, even these users avoid
any extra interaction with the water heater, but this is where after the fifth, why we stopped and we turned this into
the problem to be solved that how can we get users to not see water and electricity mixing in a water heater as a
dangerous thing? How can we increase interactions with the water heater? And that’s a problem that we took
further on to solve.
Another method of practicing empathy is empathy map. It is again putting yourself in the shoes of the user and
understand what the user is going through, feel what the user is going through. Try to write down the emotions that
the user might be going through, using as many adjectives as possible. Try to understand the activities, the
processes, the user is doing to better empathise with the user, write down those activities, the steps the user is
taking, make a video, take pictures, write down, make your notes.
Then, while you are in this situation of the user, make sure you describe it using adjectives, using sentences, the
processes, the product, the experience, the thinking and, if you're not sure what about the thinking, you can
certainly ask the user, while you're experiencing the situation that I'm experiencing this, what do you think about it?
Write down his or her views on the empathy map.
In the research exercise that you would have done or the observation exercises, you would have noted down a lot of
learnings and findings. An empathy map is a very simple way of visually plotting out all of these learnings and
findings so that the entire team working on the project can have a shared understanding of these and align on them
before moving forward.
Generally, you will create a single empathy map for a single type of user. If you have a group of users and you want
to create a common empathy map for them, it's very important to ensure that the group of users share many traits
in between them. Let's take a look at the template that can be used to create an empathy map.
An empathy map canvas is a very simple visual device, which has seven sections. Let's go through them one by one
and understand how we can fill these out. The first section is the who section. This is where you're trying to capture
information about who is it that you're trying to empathise with? What is the situation that they're in? What is their
role in that particular situation? Try and capture details about the user here.
The next section of the canvas is the do section. Here, you're trying to capture things about how does the person do
certain things? How are they responding to the situation that they're in? So, what would they do differently? What is
the final job that they want or need to get done? What are the decisions that this person needs to make? How does
the person evaluate a decision that they have made? All of that information gets captured here. The third part of this
section is the see section. What do they see around them? What do they see in the marketplace? What do they see
online? What do they see other people saying or doing? What are they watching or reading? All of the things that
this person sees and observes will have some direct or indirect role to play in the decisions that they make. The
fourth section in the canvas is the say section. Here, you're trying to capture details about what have you heard the
particular users say. If you've not observed them first-hand, try and imagine what would they say in a certain
situation.
The fifth section is the do section. How do they currently solve the problem that you're trying to solve? What have
you observed them do? What are the typical things that you notice this person do time and time again? Were there
certain scenarios where they did something different? If you didn't have a chance to observe them first-hand, try
and imagine, what would they do? The sixth section is the hear section. Here, you're trying to capture as much
information about what does this person hear as opinions or as pieces of information that will indirectly or directly
affect his or her decision making. So, what have they heard others say? What are their friends telling them? What do
their work colleagues tell them? What did they hear second-hand information about certain things? All of this is very
important.
And the last section, the seventh section is the think and the feel section. Here, because it's the empathy canvas,
you're trying to empathise with the user, you need to think about how do they think and feel in the situation that
they're in. What are their pains? What are their fears? What are their frustrations? What are their anxieties? All of
this needs to be noted down under the pain's header.
In the gain section, you're trying to think about what are their wants, needs, hopes, and dreams. All these may have
been communicated to you first-hand, or you may have observed it indirectly. Also, try and think about what are the
thoughts and feelings might motivate this person's behaviour. Remember, that is not always the particular product
or a particular service that we are working on.
Let's fill out the empathy map canvas for the Bajaj electrical water heater project. The user that we focused on
initially was the stay at home mom with a young child, this is the person who's responsible for ensuring that
everything happens on time and everybody's day starts off well. The next section that we need to fill out is the do
section. So, most often in an Indian household, the water heater gets used a lot during the morning hour. This is a
time when everybody needs to get ready for school or for office. So, for the stay-at-home mom, the most critical
thing that she needs to do during this time is get her kid ready for school so that he or she does not miss the school
bus.
The second thing that she needs to do is ensure that everybody else's day starts off well. This involves making sure
that nobody is overusing the bathroom because most often there'll be one bathroom that all of the family members
share or at most two in a house. And she's also trying to ensure that her own day starts off without any irritation for
herself or for anybody else. For the C-section for the stay at home mom, we noticed that a lot of what her friends
fitted at their homes in terms of bathrooms and furnishings and for the house, influenced her. The second thing that
influences person is the information that gets shared with her on Facebook and WhatsApp about things like do's and
don'ts when renovating your house, life hacks, what can you do for a healthy upbringing of your child, things like
this. And lastly, what she watches on television has a strong bearing on her decisions.
For the sales section during observation exercise, we noticed two things which stood out. One, any time that the kids
or the elderly people went in to use the bathroom to have a shower, the user ensured that she told them not to lock
the bathroom. This was done more from the safety perspective that in case something happens, she can rush in and
help them out.

Two, there was a lot of yelling that used to happen in the mornings, in this person's house to ensure that everybody
gets ready on time. So, she would yell at her kid to make sure that they get out of the bathroom soon. And similarly,
for the husband so that both of them can leave for office on time.
The other thing that kept coming up was saving hot water for everybody else. During the winter months, a storage
water heater has limited capacity and this person would put it on early in the morning and ensure that everybody
gets enough hot water for their own bath. So, if somebody was using too much hot water, this person would ask
them not to waste water and save it for the next person.
For the do section, we noticed that during the winter months, the stay at home mom woke up at least 30 to 45
minutes before everybody else just to put the geezer on because that's a time during the winter months, it takes for
it to start heating the water.
The second thing that she did that we noticed was before the kid went into the bathroom to have a bath, she went
in first and ensure that she turned the geezer off. The reason that she did this was that she was worried that there is
electric supply that's flowing to the giver. And if the child flashes water on it, there might be a short circuit or the
child might be in danger.
For the here section during a research with this user, they narrated incidents where they've heard other people tell
them that kids should not be playing with water in the bathroom, because sometimes they've heard of instances
where the kids got a shock if the geezer was left on.
The second thing that they've heard a lot of people say is that old people, because of limited eyesight or because of
age, they cannot check how hot the water is. And sometimes when using the shower, they turn the hot water on, on
full, and they actually get burned or scalded.
This kept coming up multiple times that if you leave the geezer on for longer than needed, it increases the electricity
bill substantially. And lastly, they narrated incidents where they've seen homes which have been refurbished or
refurnished, bathroom specially, and there when there was a storage geezer fitted inside the bathroom, it looks
really ugly to them. Lastly for the think and feel section, the stay at home mom thinks that it's her responsibility to
ensure that everybody in the family has a good start to the day. She feels really rushed and overwhelmed, especially
during the winter months where she's had to get up even earlier than usual, because she's got so much to do and
very little time to do it.
She also feels that how her home looks, how her bathroom looks, it's a statement of herself. So, she wants
everything to look perfect when there's somebody coming to visit her household. In terms of the pain areas for her,
there is a sense of constant fear when there are kids and in-laws living along with her and they're doing anything
alone. So, having a shower alone when they're doing that, for her its a time where she is feeling anxious, because
they might burn their hands with hot water, or they might get a shock.
She invariably ends up having a shower last and she gets lukewarm water. Because again, during the winter months,
limited amount of hot water, it gets used up by the time her turn comes. And that's a pain area because it is irritant

when the water is really cold. She's also got to constantly supervise the maid during her working hours, during the
day to make sure that the vessels are clean properly, clothes are washed properly, the house is kept prim and
proper. And when she wakes up early morning before everybody else, and the geezer is not being turned on already,
she's using freezing cold water to brush her teeth, wash her face, which is an irritant early morning. In terms of the
gains that she would love to have, the biggest gain that she's looking for is not having to worry about the safety of
her loved ones at home. The second thing, it would be a great scenario where she could get hot water through the
day without worrying about electricity bills.
She would love to have a beautiful home that she can show off to her friends, including a very pretty looking
bathroom. And because she's making so many decisions for herself and for others, she would like to have this feeling
that she's making smarter choices and that other people in our family especially are proud of her for the choices that
she makes.
Another way through which you can experience empathy is create journey maps. Now, what is a journey map? It is
you follow the user through the whole process, while the user is experiencing a given product, service, process,
routine, practice. You really follow it.
Again and again-again-again, look at the assumptions, look at the philosophy, look at the underlying genesis or event
that triggered a certain practice, and then you can go out of the box, look at the problems and find interesting and
innovative solutions. Empathy journey map is very much like a mother following a baby.
The baby is a user, mother is you the researcher and you're following the baby, all throughout trying to understand
the baby. The baby cannot explain too much, but you as a mother trying to understand the whole journey process.
And the better you understand, the better you write using adjectives, lines, observations, the better you describe.

Your team with whom ultimately you're going to share your data, would be able to brainstorm better and come up
with ideas, that are more efficient, innovative user friendly. Here's a template that you can use to define and
describe a empathy journey map. You can pretty much follow a given user and then write down at each instances
the user thoughts. So for instance, example.
You want to redesign the door handle, now at times the door handle could be quite clumsy. For instance, we are in
corona times and some people actually take a moment to think if they really need to touch the door handle or not?
Now, otherwise, can you redesign the door handle? It might look a very mundane problem, but it can be quite
interesting if you redesign your handle. So, you really follow as a observer. You follow the user and observe what the
user is thinking while stands in front of the door, puts his hand on the door handle, opens the door, check how much
force the person is putting.
How high is the door handle? Then how much time does it take for him to open the door and go out of the door? No,
this is a very simple process. I agree, but now think of it, can you make this whole process of putting the hand on the
door handle, putting it down pulling the door and then going out or coming inside, can you make this whole process
less dangerous?
Well, there's a very famous Danish company called Specialisterne. Now, the story of this company is that there was
this child who had autism. He as an autistic child, you lack certain social abilities. However, you have certain special

abilities that could be extremely good in mathematics, extremely good in problem solving, extremely good in finding
patterns and mistakes within patterns.
But they need special care. So, this firm Specialisterne, what they did was they designed a whole IT company that
was operated by children and adults having problems of autism and they were able to get clients from the top
companies like Maersk, SAP Oracle. They all came to this small specialised IT company Specialisterne in to solve
problems in their software.
But what's special about this company was the whole company was designed for the people suffering with autism
because they wanted that special abilities of these autistic people could be used to service the software and IT
requirements of big firms.
However, since they also understood that these autistic patients people they need specialised care, they need
special atmosphere, special work environment, they created that work environment. So for them, the user were the
autistic people, the autistic employees, and they created the whole setup around them and once they have the
whole setup around them. These autistic people, they started to work with, for them they got trained for them, and
then they became productive and used their abilities to address problems in the software and IT systems.
Another way of practicing empathy is to conduct interviews with empathy. Now, when I say interviews with
empathy, the interviews should be more something that is, that understands the user, something that does not bring
bias to the user, questions are extremely open-ended. For instance, asking a question: do you like this is a very close-
ended question? Do you like this? It's a close-ended question because the answer could be yes and no.
However, you can re-ask the same question like what are the ways through which you can address this situation, or
why are you doing this for such a long time? What is the story behind it? Letting the individual, the user speak his
heart out is one of the ways through which you can bring empathy into your interaction with the user.
When, while when you are doing interviews, you should always keep a tap on the non-verbal cues, sometimes the
body language, sometimes the environment around which the individual is positioned, don't be scared of silence.
There could be a long pause when individuals trying to describe a situation and experience with a given product,
service, process, routine or practices, don't be scared by the silence. Wait, have patience, ask questions that are
devoid of any bias.
Don't suggest answers, don't put words into the mouth, it's important because when you start putting words or
when you start suggesting answers, you're directing the user in a direction where you want the user to be, and in
that case you don't get to understand the use of the way you should be understanding.
Another way to practice empathy is to draw parallels with other experiences, stories, pictures and situations. For
instance, assuming that you observe a chaos, and you want to write about the chaos. How would you describe a
chaos? You can draw parallel to a chaotic situation with images of another chaotic places. You can draw parallels
with by describing the chaos like it looks like an ant structure.
It looks like a beehive. Oh it's a machhli market. You know we use this term machhika market to describe a chaotic
situation or noisy situation. You can bring in those analogies as adjectives and describe a chaotic situation. For
instance, if you look at this image, you can describe someone who is slow, lazy and describe the situation like sloth.
Like a you know, an animal sloth, because it's so-so slow in doing work. Bureaucracy are at times equated with
sloths, because bureaucratic systems are slow to react. You can replace bureaucratic system with a word like sloth to
describe a situation.
You can use you know, if you look at this image of a lion yawning, it so shows that even the most powerful person
could get bored and it could be used to describe a situation. You can bring in analogies from situations that are not
directly part of what you are studying, but you can use those analogies to describe a given situation that the user is
experiencing.
It is also possible that the user might not be able to describe what he or she is experiencing, and in that situation you
can certainly bring images to ask the user if he or she feels that way and then document those images, those
analogies in your report that you would be submitting to your team.

Another way of practicing empathy is to use the method of bodystorming. So, it's like method acting where you
really follow, you emulate the style of the user. You emulate the situation of the user and follow the same task the
user is doing. Experience the same tasks, the user might be experiencing, take a note of those tasks and then go to
the design table to redesign the product service.
One fine example of how you can use a bodystorm is think you have to design a product or a service for a blind
person. Blind person cannot read, so how would you design a product or a service for a blind person? How would
you feel the blindness?
One example of designing products and services, practices, routines for blind people is to be blind. Close your eyes.
Do what the blind person does. If you have to make a teapot for a blind person, experience how a blind person takes
a tea.
Start your day like a blind person, go through the whole process that a blind person goes through. Experience it, take
a note of it and then design products, services, processes, routines and practices for the blind people. Imagine in
your mind that you are designing a water boiler for a blind person. Now, water boiler is an extremely dangerous
product right.
A blind person cannot see if it's a water boil or not, and so you have to make sure that the water boiler that you're
designing for a blind person is extremely safe. It signals to the blind person that the water is boiling and it is easy to
use easy to decanted the water from the cattle to the cup. So, think about those things. How would you do so?
My first suggestion would be close your eyes, put a band around your eyes and then try to boil water. And write
down what you feel. What fear that you feel? Write that down and then think of those two ideas that that are
coming to your mind that can help you reduce the pain and uncertainty you go through while you're designing a
cattle that is specifically designed for the blind people.

Now, I gave you a lot of tips to practice empathy. Here, I'm sharing some templates that you can use in your field
research or in your user specific studies. One of the first templates is: you can use this template to prepare your
research. You can write about a given situation who the users are, who are the extreme users, and then you can
write what the users are doing, what the extreme users are doing, and then you can also write about analogies,
location, situations that further describe the user in the user situation.
This template is quite interesting because it sort of gives you an idea of the situation, an idea about the user, it can
be shared with your team and the team would be able to come on board and understand better who the user are,
what the user is experiencing. It can help you design a better product or service or a process or a situation.
The other one is here you really look at how you would interact with the research participant. So, you really need to
define who the your user are, and you have to describe the background of the user, the education, where the user
comes from, define the user.
So, you can use this template to really describe the user, and then you can go use other templates to further probe
the user, either through an interviewing method or through a empathy map or through an empathy journey.
Another template is a questionnaire guide. So, here you have three types of questions, a specific question, broad
question and dig deep question.

So, you have three types of question. So, you can have a very generic, very generic, yet specific question about the
user and then you can let the user speak about that area. So, for instance, what are your likes and dislikes in this job?
That's a very generic question, yet slightly specific.
So and the individual asks: oh, I love using my laptop. Really, can you describe more about your interaction with a
laptop? What kind of softwares you work on, how much time you spend on laptop? So, you go broad and the
individual maybe speak a lot about he likes using XYZ ERP systems. So you say: oh you, like this software. What's so
special about this software, why do you like this software? What kind of interfaces this software have?
What else do you like about the software, who designed this software? Can you tell me more about this software?
Why are you using this software more often? So, you go dig deeper. You start with a very generic, yet specific area.
You go broad. Let the individual explore and discuss more about that the topic, and then you go deeper into that
area and see if you can find some relevance that could be of interest to you.
Another question guide is a field guide that is when you are going in the field and you have to do research. So what
you can do is you can use this template and write down things to see. So, when you go to the field, assuming you
want to study, you want to study how workers make a car?
Now, a lot of injuries, work related injuries happen inside a factory. So, it's very important that you redesign the
factory to make it safer for the workers, and so in order to do that, you really have to live with the workers'
experience, what they're doing, how they're doing it, collect data from all the stakeholders of a factory to make the
factory more safe for the workers?
And so, if that's the study you have to do, you can use this template. You can write down what you want to observe
and what you want to do in order to collect the data. You want to observe how the workers are engaged in the
factory processes. You want to observe the high risk areas of injuries.
You want to observe areas where there is crowding areas, where there is slippery areas which have a possibility of
higher risk injuries. That's what you want to observe. What you want to do is you want to interview people, you
want to interview supervisors, you want to interview people who work on sites which are risk prone or prone to
accidents.

You want to interview workers and take their feedback on the issues that have the risk of high injuries. You want to
meet the HSE guides of the industry to understand the issues with the given factory. So, you can write these things
down in this template and be more prepared. You know it's horrible. If you go in a site visit to collect data from users
and you're not prepared, so it's very important to be prepared.
It takes time, but then the data that you get is extremely good. Another template is a template that can help you
prepare for the field work. So, really you can use this template, if you're a big team, you can divide the role of the
team and then use this template to describe what you're going to do in the field work.
And then so and so forth. So, you can use these templates as you like it, and these templates can help you collect
data. You can use it in the industry, wherever you go. If you work, if you're already working in a company, you can
use these templates to collect data and to do your research.

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Empathising with Stakeholders

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