3 Mindsets That Will Make Your Discovery and Empathy Interviews Better

When I was earning my advanced design thinking certificate, I learned about the value of empathy interviews for understanding stakeholders' perspectives as part of the product or service design process.

Prior to the design thinking courses, I was familiar with discovery interviews and so I thought these were the same thing with different names. You may hear people use "discovery interview" and "empathy interview" interchangeably. I've come to understand it this way: empathy interviews include discovery, but not all discovery interviews achieve empathy.

Developing empathy as part of your interviews is important to helping you think differently during the design process because of a deeper understanding of your stakeholder's perspective.

Here are three mindsets to help you move toward empathy in your interviews:

Beginner's Mindset

Too often, interviewers are looking for confirmation of what they already know or believe. That's not discovery. In an interview, you must adopt a beginner's mindset—setting aside your preconceptions or ideas about solutions—to really discover new ideas, needs, issues.

Perceiver's Mindset

In advancing toward empathy, know that among the types of empathy are cognitive empathy (taking another's perspective) and emotional empathy (sharing another's feelings). Most discovery interviews achieve some level of cognitive empathy, but results are stronger when the interviewer can feel the frustration of the subject's pain points or the satisfaction of their wins. Perceiving is thinking and feeling—a perceiver's mindset will help you achieve both kinds of empathy.

Helper's Mindset

Another kind of empathy is compassionate empathy. This may sound like it's only for the helping professions, or situations where individuals are friends or close in other ways. But being compassionate is about conveying a desire and willingness to help. Talking about your intended solution to your interviewee's problem is not recommended, but creating a sense that you are truly interested in helping your interviewee with their challenges can increase the yield of your interview in terms of the specifics of those challenges.

First, make sure you really are discovering, then work toward empathy by thinking and feeling like the interviewee. Finally, help your interviewee know that you are compassionate to their cause—you are seeking to help.