User-centred design is often spoken about with an almost reverential tone, as if simply invoking the phrase is enough to create a seamless, intuitive, and accessible product. At the heart of this approach sits empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. However, too often, empathy in design is treated as a checkbox exercise rather than a fundamental guiding principle. True empathy in design isn’t just about acknowledging user pain points; it’s about genuinely engaging with their experiences, anticipating needs, and ensuring that the solutions created serve real people in meaningful ways.

It’s easy to assume that user research inherently builds empathy, but gathering data isn’t the same as truly understanding the people behind the statistics. Consider a scenario where a company mandates usability testing before launching a new product. The team follows through, conducting interviews, running eye-tracking tests, and assembling heatmaps. They tick every methodological box, but the insights gathered are distilled into a spreadsheet, stripped of context and nuance. If empathy were really driving the process, designers wouldn’t just be looking for patterns in numbers; they’d be listening to users’ frustrations, understanding their mental models, and challenging assumptions that might be baked into the project’s initial requirements.

Balancing business objectives with user needs is one of the most difficult aspects of design. A classic example is the ever-contentious onboarding experience. Business goals often dictate a data-capture-heavy approach, requiring users to provide extensive personal information before they’ve even had a chance to experience the product. Designers who approach this from a purely functional perspective may comply without question, crafting a form that collects the required details efficiently. An empathetic designer, however, might push back—asking why these details are needed upfront, whether users are likely to abandon the process, and if there’s a way to make onboarding feel less like an interrogation and more like a welcoming handshake. The key is not to reject business requirements but to interpret them in ways that respect the user’s experience while still achieving business goals.

Don Norman. Photo: Peter Belanger

Empathy-driven design requires stepping into the lives of the users rather than observing from a distance. Take OXO’s Good Grips kitchen utensils as an example. Founder Sam Farber designed them after noticing his wife, who had arthritis, struggling with standard kitchen tools. Rather than designing purely for the ‘average’ user, Farber created something that worked better for everyone, applying genuine empathy rather than superficial inclusivity. This is the difference between designing for users in theory and designing for users in reality.

Notable designers have long recognised that empathy is more than just a buzzword. Don Norman, one of the foremost voices in human-centred design, emphasises that good design isn’t about making things pretty but about making them usable. His philosophy hinges on the idea that designers must understand how people think, act, and react rather than relying solely on best practices or industry trends. Similarly, Patricia Moore, an industrial designer and gerontologist, famously disguised herself as an elderly woman for three years to understand the everyday challenges faced by ageing individuals. This level of commitment to user experience goes beyond research; it embodies the kind of deep empathy that leads to groundbreaking design.

Empathy in user-centred design means making room for real-world context. Accessibility should never be an afterthought, yet it often is. If designers truly embraced empathy, they would design interfaces that work for users with screen readers from the outset rather than retrofitting accessibility features later. A voice assistant that doesn’t account for different speech patterns, an e-commerce checkout that assumes users can easily type, or a travel app that fails to consider people with mobility issues all point to a lack of genuine engagement with users’ lived experiences.

Building an empathy-driven design culture requires a shift in perspective. It means moving beyond the persona templates that reduce users to a handful of bullet points and actually involving them in the design process. Co-design workshops, immersion studies, and ongoing user engagement—not just during research phases but throughout the entire lifecycle of a product—are essential. It’s not enough to ‘put yourself in the user’s shoes’ for a moment; designers must continually question whether their decisions are genuinely serving users or simply meeting stakeholder expectations.

When empathy is embedded into design processes, it transforms the way products are built. It’s not just about making things look good or work efficiently—it’s about making sure they work for everyone. As technology advances, the importance of human-centred thinking grows ever more critical. AI-driven design, for instance, risks dehumanising experiences if empathy isn’t central to the decision-making process. The challenge isn’t just in designing products that function well; it’s in ensuring that technology serves real human needs rather than forcing people to adapt to poorly considered systems.

Empathy in design is not about being sentimental or idealistic. It’s about responsibility. It’s about recognising that every design decision impacts real people and ensuring that those impacts are positive. True user-centred design doesn’t just consider users—it respects them, learns from them, and, most importantly, designs with them in mind from the very start.