em·pa·thy

This stems from the Greek words, em meaning ‘in’ and pathos meaning ‘feeling’.

“The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”

We use this term in design a lot. I’ve always been curious about the deep meaning of this word. It is the correct word to use in most contexts. Especially when trying to understand the frustrations, the experiences of the users, and the user personas we’re designing for.

However, empathy is just the understanding. It means we understand the pain, the frustrations, and the environment of our users. It doesn’t mean we care to do anything about it. That would be compassion.

com·pas·sion

Stemming from the Latin word, compati then compassio meaning, ‘suffer with’.

“Sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”

An important difference... previously, I would say that that I learned to code to be more empathetic to my developer counterparts. I think I learned to code because I was empathic, and that empathy moved me to want to actually make a difference. To give a damn about what challenges were preventing my pixel perfect mocks from getting into the hands of the users we were building products for.

I think this is the answer I’m most satisfied with when people ask me why I care so much about development. I didn’t get into development so that I could solve complex computer science problems. I learned to code so that I could bring rich user interfaces to life. So that when I designed an interface that it was able to be built in a timely manner, in a simple way.