By: Alexander Dawson
Whenever we talk about the subject of user experience, one word pulls itself to the front of every discussion. This word is empathy, the ability to understand the feelings and thoughts of your visitors and to be able to effectively place yourself in their shoes. Some people are more naturally empathic than others but the key principle remains the same. If you want to build a user-interface or create something that will gain widespread appeal, you need to know what your visitors need. Oh dear!

Humans Aren’t Psychic
Trying to gauge what your visitor’s individual needs are (as dynamic as they can be) is like swimming against the tide of the ocean. Not only is the human mind a complex organism, it’s downright next to impossible to read someone’s mind, even if you’ve known them for years. So unless you’re psychic or some sort of godly figure, how on earth are the rest of us meant to cope with such a challenge? The simple and unfortunate truth is that in our industry, most people don’t cope and fail at the task.

Image credit: jamwithsand
Figure 1: Trying to read what’s going on inside visitors brains is impossible.
Emotional Psychology
If there’s one thing psychology can teach us, it’s that the types of emotions we suffer can seriously impact our ability to browse the web. Whether we are so tired that we can barely keep our faces off of the keyboard to the crazed acts of anger which make us hurl our monitors from a multi-story building’s window – the need to address such feelings and issues is paramount. By taking the time to better know and understand our visitors we can seek out such issues and resolve them (pain free).

Image credit: Amir Rijavec
Figure 2: We all have a range of emotions which can impact our experiences.
So how exactly are we meant to tackle something as complex as human emotions? I’m certainly not suggesting that you sit your visitors down on a couch and follow Freud’s notion of asking them about their mother – The general method we use to gather information on the web is through good ole fashioned research and feedback. My guess is that many of you already get some kind of feedback as it is, whether through your blogs comments or something like Google Analytics.
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