Empathizing - the first step of Design Thinking

Design Thinking

Since I started in Entrepreneurship, many lessons, videos, lecturers and experts repeatedly emphasize that entrepreneur need to learn to understand the users' problems and needs in order to provide a solution to solve the problems. Design Thinking helps us to develop innovation solution base on the needs of users. There are five to seven phases in Design Thinking but the first phase of Design Thinking is Empathizing.

What is Empathy (Empathizing)?

According to Cambridge University, Empathy is the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation.

Two days ago, I was honored to be invited to share how SheASK engage with people and empathize with them on social media with a group of students from Youth Entrepreneurship Program by SEIP (Social Entrepreneurship Incubation Program). In the working session, I shared my experience in the recent social media engagement project with prospect community members. At the beginning, I was mainly just focusing on the problems surfaced in the women society. However, throughout the engagement process, I learned how to be empathizing my users (women) and also learning to focus on my users' perspective to better understand their lifestyle, behavior, needs and problems. The result improved immediately and we are now continuously engaging with our prospects better.

In a nutshell...

Design Thinking is not exclusive to entrepreneurship but it is a method of thinking that all of us could apply in our daily life. From my personal experience, I believe that being empathy is part of personal development. It is imperative in our personal life which improves the quality of our living and strengthen our relationship with others such as listen empathetically to our family members or co-workers helps us to understand their situation better. Regardless you are at home or in the workplace, showing empathy to another women is also a gesture of women empowerment because you listen attentively and share their feelings and experience.

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