The most important tool designers can have is empathy, or the ability to understand one’s feelings to the same level as their own. On the surface, this may seem expected. It might also seem mushy. But it’s more complex and important than indication would lead on.

First, lets talk about design. To design is to motivate. It is not to inspire. Art is the better career for changing an audience’s perspective. That doesn’t mean design can’t be inspiring. Plenty of designers are inspired by a fresh take on an old convention. But other designers are not necessarily the audience for our creation.

No, we motivate and persuade. We get people to click buttons, fill out forms, pull levers, write with pens. We persuade them to buy books, search for information, forward an email, push that shiny red button. Granted, not all design is meant to be so manipulative: thousands of designs go into engineering a car—one centimeter off and a part can break. But for the purposes of digital design, I believe our primary purpose is to convince our audience to do an action.

In order to properly motivate, the designer must understand her audience. This is a known, generic observation. Everyone has heard of the cliché “put yourself in the user’s shoes” and so on. Although this is important, and I agree a requirement, it’s only a light descriptor for the root objective.

I’ve found that empathy is the foundational lens a designer must use. The main reasons:

• You genuinely feel awful when your design doesn’t work as intended for the user. This provides as much drive as anything to continually be better.
• Your design has more compassion as you’re concerned about how it impacts the user’s day. This leads to a heightened understanding of the audience.
• Your design feels more human.
• Your design has more clarity.
• Since you care about the user, you do understand how they think. This leads to a better execution of the main goal of the design: to motivate the user to do what you want them to.

Designers are the champions for empathy. Unfortunately, care like this gets a bad rap. Thus, empathy must be an organizational trait.

If engineers and developers don’t have empathy for the customer, corners will be cut and wrong approaches will be taken. After all, it’s much easier to not care about the users, even if you do have an understanding of what they want.

If marketing and sales do not have empathy for the customer, the wrong messages will be sold.

If management doesn’t have empathy for the customer, guidance will be misplaced. Focus will not be on the what really matters.

There is a difference between understanding the end user and genuinely caring about their experience with a product. If empathy isn’t present throughout the product’s provider, it shows.