The big idea: Empathizing is not feeling sorry for users. It is finding out their experience, their motivations and their interactions with products and environments — and writing it down as something the team can design against.
The output is a persona representing a group of end-users.
Each field arrives from a finding. A field with no arrow behind it was invented, and invention gets designed for.
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A hospital bedside table has three user groups who want different things from it, which is why identifying issues for specific user groups is a separate skill from writing one persona.
| User group | Their experience | What they need from it |
|---|---|---|
| Patients | Reaching sideways from a bed, often one-handed, sometimes unsteady | Everything within reach without twisting, and a surface that does not tip |
| Nurses | Moving it away and back many times a shift, often while carrying something | To move it with one hand or a foot, and for it to stay where it is put |
| Cleaners | Working round it and under it against a fixed time per bay | A base that does not trap dirt and can be cleared with one movement |
Conflicts are the design problem: Nurses want it to move easily. Patients want it not to move at all when they lean on it.
A persona does not remove that conflict — it makes it explicit and forces you to decide whose need is essential. That decision is the design.
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How issues actually turn up
Watch for the workaround
A jug moved onto the bed, a table wedged with a chair, a cloth left over a wheel. Every workaround is a problem the user has already tried to solve.
Watch for the thing never used
The swivel lock nobody touches is either not needed or not understood, and either answer changes the design.
Ask about the last time, not in general
"What happened the last time you needed something you could not reach?" gets an event. "Is it easy to reach things?" gets a politeness.
Ask the group nobody interviews
Cleaners are rarely asked about ward furniture and know more about its base than anyone. The unasked group is usually where the new finding is.
Motivations, not just needs: A patient who will not press the call button for a drink is not short of a button — they are unwilling to be a nuisance.
That motivation explains a behaviour you would otherwise call irrational, and it rules out every solution that involves asking for help.
How this is tested — identifying user needs for specific groups and representing them in a persona. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — multiple choice
- Identify which user group a stated need belongs to.
- Pick the persona field a finding supports.
Paper 2 — analysing a product
- Identify the needs of two user groups for a named product.
- Explain how a persona guides a decision when groups conflict.
The trap: Writing one persona for a product with several user groups, then designing an average. Name the groups, choose a primary, and say what you are trading away.
A hospital bedside table is used by patients, nurses and cleaners. Identify the needs of each group and explain which should be treated as primary.
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