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Design Stage

Empatia - o (nie!) zapomnianej umiejętności projektantów

September 18, 2025 1:05 PM

Power Talk

🇬🇧 English

About

Empatia to jedno z najczęściej powtarzanych słów w świecie UX, ale czy naprawdę tak często ją wykorzystujemy? Podczas mojej prezentacji pokażę, jak przejść od pustego hasła do realnego narzędzia, które ma wpływ na sukces produktu. Dowiesz się, dlaczego przypadek jednej z polskich uczelni pokazał, że empatia i spójność nie zawsze idą w parze, jak dobre chęci pewnego NGO – bez faktycznego zrozumienia problemu – tylko pogorszyły sytuację oraz dlaczego, mimo że wszyscy gracze w pewnej branży z powodzeniem kopiowali od siebie rozwiązanie, tylko jedna firma stała się memem. Porozmawiamy o tym, jak wejść w buty użytkownika w praktyce – w zależności od rodzaju produktu. Będzie o badaniach, obserwacjach i praktycznych sposobach weryfikacji pomysłów. Wszystko po to, by Twoje projekty faktycznie działały dla użytkowników i odpowiadały na ich (prawdziwe!) potrzeby i problemy.

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Talk by

Photo of Natalia Sidor, Design Manager at Flying Bisons

Design Manager at Flying Bisons

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From the recording

Talk in brief

In her presentation at WaysConf 2025, Natalia Sidor, Design Manager at Flying Bisons, explores how designers can move beyond treating empathy as a buzzword and instead apply it as a practical, structured tool. Sidor breaks empathy down into three distinct types: emotional (sharing feelings), cognitive (understanding perspectives intellectually), and compassionate (taking action to help). Using real-world examples, including a corporate banking mobile app redesign for a Saudi Arabian bank and a co-designed digital product for the cosmetics industry, she demonstrates how cognitive and compassionate empathy can reshape design decisions. Sidor argues that designers must reject the assumption that they are typical users, highlighting how different contexts, user backgrounds, and situational stressors alter product interaction. By asking simple questions about who uses a product, where they use it, and why, design teams can avoid trend-chasing pitfalls—such as LinkedIn's short-lived stories feature—and build highly functional, complementary digital experiences that address genuine user needs.

Key takeaways

01
Three Dimensions of Empathy
Empathy in design consists of emotional empathy (feeling what others feel), cognitive empathy (intellectually understanding perspectives), and compassionate empathy (taking action to solve problems). Designers must balance these to build truly user-centric products.
Watch from 0:50
02
The Pitfall of Trend-Chasing Without Context
Implementing popular features like stories without considering user intent and professional context can lead to failure, as seen when LinkedIn introduced stories to a professional network where users prefer permanent, career-oriented content.
Watch from 5:44
03
Designing Complementary Mobile Solutions
When adapting a complex corporate banking web platform for mobile, the team realized that instead of replicating every feature, they needed to build a complementary app focused on quick approvals and financial overviews.
Watch from 8:34
04
Active User Participation Over Assumptions
Knowing user problems is not enough; designers must actively involve users in the design process through interviews, user story mapping, and usability testing to validate how they actually interact with a product.
Watch from 13:32
05
Transforming Negative Experiences with Emotional Empathy
Emotional empathy can be used to mitigate user stress or frustration, such as LOT Polish Airlines offering a 24-hour free cancellation window or Wolt offering credits and apologies after a delayed food delivery.
Watch from 17:36

Video chapters

0:00Introduction to Empathy in Design
Natalia Sidor introduces the concept of empathy and explains why it should be treated as a practical design tool rather than a buzzword.
0:50The Three Types of Empathy
The speaker defines emotional, cognitive, and compassionate empathy, illustrating them through her relationship with her adopted dog.
2:50Cognitive Empathy and User Diversity
Sidor discusses the importance of understanding diverse user backgrounds, situations, and needs, particularly when designing broad-scale platforms.
5:44The Pitfalls of Trend-Chasing: LinkedIn Stories
An analysis of how copying successful features from other platforms without considering user context and intent can lead to product failure.
8:34Case Study: Redesigning Corporate Banking for Mobile
How Flying Bisons designed a complementary mobile app for a Saudi Arabian bank by focusing on specific mobile use cases rather than replicating the desktop platform.
11:32Compassionate Empathy and Co-Designing with Users
A deep dive into a cosmetics industry project where active user research, wireframe testing, and collaborative mapping helped filter out useless features.
17:36Emotional Empathy and Turning Bad Experiences Around
Examples of how companies like LOT and Wolt use emotional empathy to reduce user anxiety and build long-term customer loyalty.

Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

Defining the Three Types of Empathy

Empathy is not a single, uniform concept; it is divided into three distinct categories. Emotional empathy is the capacity to share and feel the emotional state of another person. Cognitive empathy, which is perhaps the most critical for designers, involves intellectually understanding how someone else thinks and feels without necessarily sharing their emotions. Finally, compassionate empathy is the active driver that motivates us to take action and help resolve the problems that others are facing. Understanding these differences allows designers to apply empathy more systematically throughout the product development lifecycle.

Watch from 0:50

The Myth of the Designer as the Typical User

Designers often fall into the trap of assuming that because they use a product, they automatically understand all of its users. In reality, being a user yourself only makes it easier to empathize with a very specific subset of the audience. Designers possess specialized digital literacy and experience, making it much easier for them to navigate complex interfaces or spot hidden patterns, such as dark patterns in subscription cancellations. True cognitive empathy requires recognizing that actual users come with highly diverse backgrounds, varying levels of technical knowledge, and different situational constraints.

Watch from 5:02

Why LinkedIn Stories Failed to Connect

When LinkedIn decided to introduce a stories feature, they likely fell into the trap of chasing industry trends without analyzing their users' specific context. While stories work exceptionally well on platforms like Instagram or Snapchat where people share casual, fleeting moments of daily life, LinkedIn serves a professional audience. Users on a professional network generally want their content to remain visible on their profiles to support their career paths, rather than disappearing after 24 hours. By failing to align the feature with the core motivations of their users, the feature quickly became a meme and was eventually discarded.

Watch from 5:44

Designing a Complementary Mobile App for Corporate Banking

When a major Saudi Arabian bank asked Flying Bisons to adapt their massive corporate banking web platform into a mobile app, the team resisted simply copying the desktop features. By analyzing the context of who would use the app, where, and why, they realized that corporate executives do not want to perform complex tasks like bulk payroll transfers on their phones. Instead, they need quick access to financial overviews and a streamlined way to approve or reject pending transaction requests while on the move. This led to the creation of a complementary mobile product tailored specifically to on-the-go management.

Watch from 8:34

Co-Designing with Users in the Cosmetics Industry

In a project for the cosmetics market, the client initially proposed over thirty feature ideas, including a wheel of fortune to help users decide what to eat for lunch. Rather than building these based on assumptions, the design team engaged in deep user research, conducting interviews to understand the daily routines of salon managers and beauticians. By mapping user stories and running usability tests on low-fidelity wireframes, they narrowed the list down to ten essential features that solved real operational problems. Unnecessary features, like the lunch decision wheel, were easily filtered out through this collaborative process.

Watch from 13:32

Leveraging Emotional Empathy to Build Loyalty

Emotional empathy acts as the finishing touch in user experience design, allowing companies to turn stressful or negative moments into positive interactions. For example, LOT Polish Airlines mitigates the anxiety of booking expensive long-haul flights by offering a risk-free 24-hour cancellation window. Similarly, when a food delivery service like Wolt encounters an issue like a delayed order, proactively reaching out with an apology and credits can transform a frustrating experience into an opportunity to strengthen customer loyalty. Anticipating these emotional pain points helps designers build safer, more reassuring products.

Watch from 17:36

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