Empathizing: Are we mostly doing Empathize Theatre in our design?

In the past, when I worked on projects, we used to say "let's empathize" - let's put ourselves in the shoes of the customer/employee, let's capture their thoughts, feelings, motivations emotions"

Now we have empathized!! Let's go and design.... and then...

The product, and service didn't perform as expected.

But why not? we listed and we gave the users everything they wanted.

Lets revisit that:

In the project, we captured information (in our own biased way)

We took data like:

"I don't know how to do this"

And we assumed it was a capability issue, these people lack knowledge, let's do tutorials.

However when they say they don't know, it could also mean they don't believe they can do it - that is not a capability issue, that is a belief issue and the way you design for that is totally different.

Nowhere in the empathize phase do we take our work and then use a systematic, evidence-based approach, we just jump into doing it.

We are talking about real people and we are meant to be enabling them to make the choices they wanted to make.

Yet we used no psychological models, we used no behavior frameworks, to take that empathy (in-the-weeds research) and code or classify it in the right way.

We didn't do lit reviews to see what has been done in the past from psychology or other behavior change approaches.

We just confirm to ourselves that we know what is best for the user ( yes, I have had PMs tell me those exact words) - and yes, there is nothing wrong with the PM saying they represent the customer, but they need to do so with the right approach to back it up.

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