Empathy is an essential ability for designers to step into users’ shoes and potentially discover their latent needs. However, although empathy helps designers to better understand users, the degree to which designers can actually understand them remains unclear. Consequently, it is essential to measure the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding. In our previous work, we have adopted an experimental procedure from psychology to quantify designers’ empathic accuracy. However, the measure as such is time-consuming. Therefore, we attempted to shorten the experimental time while retaining the validity of the measure. This paper reports on the process of shortening the measure and compares the original instrument with the shortened one. The data collected from the shortened instrument shows excellent internal consistency and between subject variance and is able to produce similar results to the original longer measure.

The influence of designers' cultural differences on the empathic accuracy of user understandingUnderstanding user experience has become an important part of product design, but doing it well remains challenging. Given the global market and the resulting ubiquity of cross-cultural design, to improve user experience, designers should accurately understand users from different cultures. The extent to which designers can empathize and understand users from different cultures is an under researched topic. This paper combines Empathic Accuracy Rating with a user experience survey to measure the empathic accuracy of 12 designers trying to understand the experience of users from different cultural backgrounds. The results show that cultural differences reduce the accuracy of their user understanding. This effect can be mitigated by providing designers with more details of users' living context.

The success of design needfinding is largely dependent on how well designers understand their users. It is further claimed that user understanding and designers’ capacity to adopt users’ perspective, i.e. designers’ ability to understand others, are key skills that should lead to successful design outcomes. The general ability to understand someone else’s mental contents, such as what they else think, feel, wish, and believe, is called theory of mind. In this study, we connect concepts of human-centered design and theory of mind through empathic accuracy, a performance-based method for measuring empathy. We state two hypotheses. First, that designers are equally accurate at inferring thoughts as they are at inferring feelings. Second, that designers are more accurate in inferring design-related mental contents than those that are not related to design. We answer these hypotheses by analyzing results of altogether 24 designers watching recorded needfinding interviews of 6 users and inferring their mental contents. We observed that feelings were more accurately inferred than thoughts, although the data showed some inconsistencies. A stronger case can be made for designers’ accuracy of design-related entries, where designers were consistently more accurate at inferring design-related entries than non-design-related ones. These results provide concrete insight into how designers understand users and how empathy could be quantified in the design context.

For engineering design to be successful, it is essential to understand customer experience and identify customer needs. However, it is challenging to understand customers, especially those from different national cultures. The empathy literature suggests that having similar experiences to another person can help understand them better. This study adopts an empathy measure from psychology for use in a project where designers attempt to understand customers' driving experiences in different countries and identify their needs for detecting road hazards. We quantify designers' empathic accuracy and the correctness of their rating of customers' emotional tone. The results show that national cultural differences significantly affect the accuracy of designers' empathic understanding but do not impact their understanding of customers' emotional tone.

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