Creative Empathy for Meaningful UX

Great UX addresses our deepest human needs. And Creative Empathy for Meaningful UX helps us discover those needs.

Empathy gives us insight into people’s deeper needs.

Creative Empathy for Meaningful UX

Dublin UX LIVE@HOME
Streaming Live: 4 November 2021, 18:00 – 19:00 UTC+2

Video

In this talk, we demystify empathy as a UX skill. We cover the key theoretical concepts and discuss practical techniques anyone can use to deploy Creative Empathy to design for meaningful human experiences.

What We Cover

The empathic design process
How creative empathy works
Some techniques and examples
Any questions or concerns you may have

This Talk is For

Designers
Researchers
Engineers
Product Managers
Marketing Leaders
Anyone who develops products & services

Downloads

Creative Empathy for Meaningful UX - Dublin UX

👉 Download the slides here (PDF)

Character Map Canvas (PDF)

Ethical Design Checklist (PDF)

References

Creative Empathy

Creative Empathy is a toolkit for connecting with people’s deepest needs in any creative project.

Learn More 💚

Transcript

Patrick
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, and you are very, very welcome to this special edition of Dublin UX coming to you live here from Dublin, and it’s gonna be a truly international event.

We’ve got Brian is gonna be joining us shortly from the Netherlands, and you know what? Wherever you’re joining from today, you are very, very welcome to our event. This is our last Dublin UX for this year and we are already planning our events for next year, so if you’ve got any ideas for us, please reach out. We would love to hear your ideas. If you want to speak, we have a stage.

Come join our virtual stage as well, so you’re very, very welcome to this edition of Dublin UX and we do want to hear from you. We’ve got many ways in which you can communicate with us today. We got a chat inside of YouTube and a chat on LinkedIn.

We’re broadcasting across both platforms today. Please engage with your other attendees. We want to hear from you. We want to hear your comments. We will read your comments and we put a selection of those comments on screen. Let’s have a look and see who’s out there today.

We’ve got Kev. Good evening, Kev. How are ya? Rick, pleasure. Pleasure to have you back with us again. Anne, welcome. Flavien helping in the background. Flavien, great job. If you’re going to be interacting with us today and you want to join us live, Flavien’s gonna be looking out for you.

Send us a direct message on Twitter to Dublin_UX and we’ll bring you in and we’ve got a special prize if you do come on live on camera today. We would love to have you as well. Let’s see who else we’ve got. Megan. Very, very welcome, and let’s see who else. We’ve got Orla. Very, very welcome.

We’ve got a great session planned today, so keep chatting, keep engaging. You can tweet us your pictures.

How are you watching today? #DublinUX or get us at @Dublin_UX and we’re monitoring those and retweeting as well. This is our 51st edition, our 51st Dublin UX. It’s unbelievable, 51 events, and we hit a great milestone as well in the last week. We hit our 3,700th member.

That’s a lotta people, so it’s phenomenal. We’ve been going for over five years, really, really honored and humble to be able to put this together with the rest of the team to really, it’s edutainment, and I heard the term recently, and it is. It’s entertainment. It’s education. It’s everything coming together, so it’s great numbers, really, really good.

I do also like to talk about our Rewind, Dublin UX Rewind. We started this initiative off at the start of the pandemic all those months ago to really connect and showcase some talks that you may not have gone to, you may not have heard before, and we’re continually adding to that catalog, and you know what? It’s towards the end of the year, it’s November, and it was this time two years ago we were planning our big Christmas special.

I don’t know if you were there, if you were present. We had a few hundred people gather for our UX selection box on, I think it was the 3rd of December in 2019. Great event over in Zendesk, and it’s when you look at these pictures, like this is what we had before and this is what we hopefully will be going back to in a more hybrid fashion because we do want to continue doing these events online.

Some great pictures from that event and I think this is great. There we are all gathering, eating, sharing food. Our events, of course, have moved hybrid, have gone online and hybrid is gonna be the way forward, so next year, watch this space, but I’m showing these particular photographs for a reason, because this event was recorded. We’ve made one of the talks available already and that’s the talk about the digital healthcare revolution with Frank and Henry from Frontend.

That’s available now to stream on rewind.DublinUX.ie. We do have the talk from Amy and we’ve got Alberta’s talk, just haven’t edited down. They will be edited and they will be posted in the next month.

We’re almost going to relive our selection box two years later. Look out for that in the coming weeks. Okay, we do want to share some news about our leadership team here, and my good friend and co-organizer Frank has stepped down.

Frank has been part of our organizing team here for quite some time and Frank is a great friend and will continue to be a great friend, but Frank, we’re gonna miss you in Dublin UX, so some photographs there from previous events. Thank you so much for everything that you’ve done and best of luck with everything in the future and we’ll hang out very, very soon, and that does create an opening.

That creates an opportunity. We do have opportunities for you. If you would like to help shape Dublin UX, if you would like to be here emceeing, if you would like to be in the background putting these events together, if you wanna be editing the content, we have something for everyone, so a general call. If you would like to volunteer for this, please reach out. I’ve got the URL, goto.DublinUX.ie/feedback. That is now how you can help, or just email us, events@DublinUX.ie. I’m also looking for ideas, ideas, talks ideas, themes ideas.

Maybe you’d like to speak. Just reach out to us via any of those methods and I will be only too pleased to create an opportunity for you to be in front of your peers. Right, we’ve got a few housekeeping items here.

David from Product Elevation reached out to me. They’re hosting their first community conference and it’s going to be a virtual conference on November 18th and 19th, and really, it’s a very special event.

Here’s just a snapshot of some of the speakers. There’s John Cutler speaking, and from our old Dublin UX alumni, Donal O’Mahony from Verizon Connect, and Grace is gonna be speaking, but it’s a great caliber an event over two days.

The theme is discover together. It’s gonna run across four tracks, so look out for that. They’re selling tickets at the moment and they’ve kindly given us a couple of tickets to give away, and I’m gonna be giving them away today to participants who are going to be taking part live in today’s event.

I’ll explain how in the next few moments, but if you are interested in getting tickets for that, they’re currently on a little bit of a promotion for the next few days. You can use that code on screen, PRDELV20 for 20% off ticket prices. Productelevation.org.

Without further ado, I’m going to bring Brian into the conversation. Brian is why we are here. Brian, how are ya?

Brian
Hey, great. How are you?

Patrick
Oh, it’s great to hear you. You are very, very welcome to Dublin UX. Let me just do a little introduction. First of all, you’re an inspiration. I’ll just say that. You are an inspiration. If we look at your professional bio, an award-winning human experience designer, master’s in psychology, professional doctorate in human-computer interaction, 19 years in the game, in this industry that we call design, across various aspects of that.

Brian
It’s gray hair here.

Patrick
The gray hair, there you go. At least you have it. I don’t have anything! Actor, my God, and we’re gonna talk a lot about acting today. This is gonna be a big part of some of our discussions, and really, the body of work that we’re gonna talk about today, it has been your life journey and I think that’s really, really interesting.

I love talking about what was your calling, what is your reason for being, and when I did read your book, and here it is here, “The Creative Empathy Field Guide,” it’s just, it resonates you. It’s fantastic.

Brian
Thank you so much.

Patrick
Tell us a bit about yourself that I haven’t already said.

Brian
I think the biggest thing that people probably get wrong about me is that I’m actually really shy and people don’t tend to believe that. I come across as very extroverted and I move around a lot and I talk a lot, but in reality, I’m kind of a homebody.

I like to spend a lotta time alone. I like to spend a lotta time in the woods, so yeah, I guess that would be a little tidbit of knowledge.

Patrick
And you’re talking to us today from the Netherlands.

Brian
Absolutely, yes.

Patrick
You don’t have a Dutch accent, so tell us a bit about your background.

Brian
Oh, yeah. I actually came from the United States over to Germany. I served there for a few years in the United States Air Force, and when that was over, I decided to stay in Europe and I wanted to go to school, so I came to the Netherlands, and yeah, I kinda got stuck, met a wonderful woman and we got a cat and bought a house, and yeah, it kinda happened all together.

Patrick
And the rest is history, as they say.

Brian
And the rest is history, as they say.

Patrick
Fantastic. I am completely honored to have you part of our event today.

Brian
Honored to be here. Thank you.

Patrick
We’ve been speaking on and off over the last few weeks and I think the message and the story you’re gonna tell today is something that we as practitioners in this creative discipline really need to improve upon. I think when we talk about how we can employ and use creative empathy, there’s so much opportunity for us to do more and be more empathetic and be more connected to who we are designing for, and I can’t wait to hear your talk.

You do have an incredible book as well and let me just bring up some details in relation to that. It’s “The Creative Empathy Field Guide.” I’ve got 10 copies of this book to give away, and you know what? As part of the registration today, I asked everyone, “Would you like a copy of this book?” and if you said yes, your name has been put into a draw.

At the end of the talk today, we’re going to announce the 10 winners. If your name is called, I’ll email you and we’ll get this book in the post to you in the next day or so, so good luck if you’ve RSVPed yes and you put your name.

I know there’s a few hundred in that list, but it’s great to give those books away, and as an extra surprise, what we’re gonna do is, with the conference, we do have several tickets to give away. Brian, I’m going to put you on the spot. I’d like you to judge this one for me. Here’s the deal.

Brian
Let’s do it.

Patrick
Questions. If we get questions in on Twitter, if we get questions in on the chat, we’ll bring them in. The best question, the best maybe two or three questions, we’ll decide at the end, that you choose will get a ticket. Tickets are worth about 99 euro.

You get to go to that conference in about two weeks’ time, so ask those questions. The best questions will get a ticket. If you wanna be a guaranteed ticket winner, get on camera with us. Send us a DM on Twitter. We’ll give you the link.

We wanna see your smiling face. We want you to engage with us on camera. If you join us live, you’re gonna get a ticket to the conference, so that’s gonna make your life easier, Brian. You won’t have to choose a winner, but otherwise, we’ll pick a winner from the best entries.

Brian
Spare me. Spare me the choice.

Patrick
Spare you that one. With that, I think what we’ll do is, Brian, I’m going to hand it over to you. If you want to get your screen ready, get your share out and we will take it away and we’ll pass the stage over to you. I’m very excited to hear the content today, so it’s gonna be good.

Brian
Thank you so much. Actually, before I-

Patrick
Great.

Brian
Oh, sorry.

Patrick
Yeah, go for it.

Brian
I just wanted to say before I start sharing my screen, I wanted to do something else just really briefly.

Patrick
Go for it.

Brian
Let’s take a moment together and create some space, especially for those of us who have been in back-to-back meetings all day and we just have been constantly with our brains switched on and going 100 kilometers an hour the whole time.

I’d like to just take some time, take a brief moment, and let’s do a breathing exercise together, and so obviously I can’t see you, so if you’re not doing it, it’s okay. I invite you to do it. It’s not a requirement, obviously, but this is a technique that’s used by meditators, yoga practitioners, but also special forces people in the field when they’re in a stressful situation and need to calm down.

This technique helps to reduce the cortisol levels in the body and raise oxytocin, so reduce the stress hormone and raise up a little bit the creativity hormone, the love hormone, the social hormone, and briefly, I’ll just explain what we’re gonna do before we start doing it.

It’s called box breathing, and so what it is is about breathing in for a count of four, hold that for a count of four. We breathe out for a count of four and we hold that for a count of four, and that’s why they call it box breathing.

If you’re ready, yeah, cool, so if you’re all ready, I invite you to close your eyes if you like. If you don’t wanna close your eyes, it’s perfectly fine. I prefer it with my eyes closed, so I’m gonna close my eyes now, and let’s just all go ahead and breathe in. Hold it. Breathe out and hold that. One more time. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out and hold that.

Thank you so much for taking the time with me.

Patrick
Thank you so much. I feel a lot grounded now, a lot more zen, so there we go.

Brian
I’m extremely obliged. Thank you.

Patrick
Good. I will transition over to you now. I’ll get your content up on screen and we can see that. That’s perfect, so Brian, the stage is all yours. Take it away.

Brian
Thank you so much. We’ll be talking about Creative Empathy today and about meaningful UX, and when I talk about meaningful UX, I’m talking kind of about if we go back to the foundation of what we do, back to the very, very, very basic.

As Teresa Brazen says, “We make things for people and those people aren’t us,” so that means that if we wanna make those things well for them, we have to learn a little bit about what they need and what they are and who they are and how they think, but one of the limits of, let’s say, traditional research methods is that they don’t go all the way into that deep latent level of real human experience, and what I mean by that is when we think about what we feel, what we dream, what we’re afraid of, what we truly desire, those are very, very deep things, and so since those very deep emotional things actually determine our human experience in total, it’s interesting for us to try to go a little bit further than just looking at what we can learn from interviewing or observation.

And again, I’m not trying to talk trash or denigrate any of those research methods, not at all. Creative empathy isn’t meant to replace anything. It’s meant as an extra set of tools that we can carry along with us in our toolkits so that whenever we do find the need to dive deeper and become more intimately involved with the people we’re creating for, then we have a means to do so, and this is a practical set of techniques that we’re gonna talk about a little bit today for how we can develop our empathy ability and how we can also increase the proximity between our experience and the experience of those people for whom we’re creating.

Why is this important? There are certain things and benefits that empathy can actually give us.

On the more, let’s say, practical or money-driven side or capitalistic side, let’s say, empathy can actually help us achieve a product market fit, for example, or if we wanna help people to change their behavior in healthy ways, empathy can help us do that as well. It can help us inspire sustainable brand loyalty and can also help us to innovate in meaningful ways, meaningful as in ways that help us to make the world a better place, like a really, really better place for people.

But then on a more humanistic side, let’s say, empathy is also key in recognizing our shared humanity, the shared humanity of other people, especially those people that we’ve been taught our entire lives to hate or to look down upon. It also helps us to see users as more than just users, but to see them as actual people and human beings with feelings and dreams and fears and desires.

And also if we can recognize this humanity in the people for whom we’re creating, that it makes it a lot harder for us to exploit them. If we feel with people, it also helps us to be more motivated to empower them, and in empowering everybody, it helps us also to build a more equitable world for all of us, ourselves included.

It’s very lofty and whatever, but one of the big things that I wanna talk about today, or at least a big takeaway, if you remember nothing else out of this talk today, actually, it’s this one thing, it’s that empathy is not magic.

It’s not some kind of inborn talent that you either have or you don’t have. It’s more like a muscle. It’s a muscle that everyone’s got.

For some of us, that muscle is stronger than for maybe some other people, but anyone can train the muscle, so it’s not magic, it’s more like a muscle. Everyone can develop it, and when I talk about Creative Empathy, I’m referring to a specific set of practical techniques and tools that I’ve collected from different places and put together in kind of a toolkit that helps us to employ our empathy muscle in any kind of creative process.

If you’d like to follow along, you can go ahead and scan this QR code or go to the link d3e.co/dublinux (this page), and on that webpage you’ll find slides and downloads that I’m gonna be talking about as well of free PDF tools and stuff like that.

Are there any questions at the moment? Are we equipped to bring in questions so far, or I know we’re gonna have questions later on too, but I’m also happy to answer anything now, like a real quick one.

Patrick
Let me have a little check and see. We still have lots of welcome messages.

Brian
Welcome, everyone.

Patrick
If you do have any questions, get them in at this point if you have any questions. We’ve got lots of people saying welcome and great toolkit, so do have a look at that toolkit as well, but we’ve no questions yet.

Brian
Cool. Perfect. Then let’s do it later. You’ve already done a wonderful job, Patrick, of actually introducing me, so I’m not gonna go into a lot about that stuff here, but suffice to say, if you wanna learn more about creative empathy, the website for that is creativeempathy.eu.

There’s a lotta stuff there. There’s some tools. There’s other videos. There’s lots of different slide decks and documentation and the thing you can read and that’s gonna be expanded on as I develop Creative Empathy actually into a bigger service, let’s say.

And of course, we’re here talking about the book, “The Creative Empathy Field Guide,” and I’m really, really, really looking forward to actually seeing who won.

It’s like I’m really curious about that, but okay, to bring it back, Creative Empathy in a nutshell is basically our backstage pass to understanding each other’s subconscious experience, and a common misconception is that empathy is something like, “What would I do in that person’s situation?”

But what empathy really is is more like, “What do I need when I’m feeling like that person is feeling?” Okay, so obviously we act like each of us would behave differently in a similar situation, most of the time. It’s really the universal thing or the universal part of human experience isn’t really the experiences themselves or the things that happen around us.

Obviously those are very divergent, but we do have, let’s say, a common set of feelings and things that we, a palette, let’s say, of emotion that we all share as human beings, and in exploring that in the design process or in a creative process, I’d like to refer to Dr. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser’s Empathic Design Process, which I’ve visualized in this embedded loop within a loop.

And it’s a four-step process and let’s just really briefly break that down. The four steps are discovery, immersion, connection and detachment.

Discovery is when we notice on the horizon that there’s someone whom we can help, someone for whom we can actually provide a service or help out or add some value to their lives.

The immersion phase is when we actually step into their world, look around and see what’s there. This is where we do lots of UX research, ethnographic studies, interviews, observation studies and all this stuff. These are forms of immersion. This is where we’re collecting data and information about the other person’s experience.

The connection phase is a little bit the extra phase that empathy brings into the process. The connection phase is all about recalling our own experiences that were similar to the experiences that another person is feeling or going through, whether that’s emotionally or situationally or whatever, recalling those experiences for ourselves and allowing our own experience to resonate with the experiences of that other person.

This is, like I said a moment ago, if I’m thinking about what I need when I’m feeling a certain way, it’s basically that I would be immersed in another person’s world. I observe that they’re feeling a certain way or they tell me that they’re feeling a certain way, so I understand that their emotional reality is a certain way at a certain moment in, let’s say, a journey or a process, and then I reflect on a time that I can remember that I felt that same way.

And so if I can bring that back, if I can recall that emotional state and bring it back a little bit into my mind, then when I finally detach and go into stage four and start creating my solutions and start ideating and designing, then that gives me an extra layer of emotional insight that informs my design decisions moving forward. And of course, it’s a loop, so the whole process keeps starting over again.

Next to this, a little key thing that I like to talk about is the fact that empathy or experiencing empathy is a function of our empathic ability and the proximity between our experience and the experience of another person or the person with whom we’re trying to empathize.

I call this the Eindhoven Empathy Model, ’cause that’s where I came up with it or where I actually presented it for the first time. But what that really means is that because it’s a function, it means that if ability or proximity are zero, then the empathy cannot happen.

However, as long as both are not zero, then we can actually boost one to make up for, let’s say, a lack in the other, and what that means is this. If someone has highly developed empathic ability, then they don’t need as much proximity to another person to be able to empathize with them.

And the other way around, if I’m working with people who might have a lower empathic ability, then if I can help boost their proximity to the person we’re trying to empathize with, then they can also help them experience empathy, even if they’re not really good at empathic ability.

Let’s just break that down a little bit. If we think about ability and proximity, how can we boost those two things? Let’s talk about ability first and I’ll go over this quickly ’cause it’s maybe a little bit less relevant for people during a design process, but this is about, let’s say, exercising your empathy muscle, and one great way to do that is by developing your emotional vocabulary.

This is a wheel of emotion visualized by the Junto Institute and there’s lots of different versions of this wheel of emotion and lots of different ones, but I just like the way that they have gradients and it all fits together. It’s thematically very nice, and what we notice, if you look at the wheel itself, is that in the middle, we have the very basic emotions.

These are like the emotions you would see in “Inside Out,” that movie from Pixar, if you remember that. It’s the kind of the big categories of emotion, and as we move outward in the circle to the concentric layers, we notice that there’s more and more nuance.

And the reason why I like to show this is because when I’m doing workshops, for example, sometimes I’ll have people just tell each other how they’re feeling or how they’re doing today but then with this emotion wheel as a guide, and I challenge them to be as specific as they possibly can, because if we can communicate with specificity around emotion, that really helps us when we’re doing some research or if we wanna understand another person’s emotion.

It helps us to ask them more specific questions. It helps us also to elicit more specific responses from them, and as a general ability, let’s say, it also helps us communicate with people in our lives, people with whom we have relationships on a more specific level, but there’s also a neurological component.

For example, practicing mindfulness, like doing mindfulness meditation or practicing other mindfulness techniques, actually changes our neurochemistry. Literally, the empathy centers in the brain get bigger and the blood flow gets there, gets stronger in those areas for people who meditate more often and meditate for a long time.

It’s literally changing our bodies, just sitting down and meditating over time, like it’s, I don’t know. I get very, yeah, impressed by this simple fact. It’s like a technique that we’ve been doing, humanity’s been doing for thousands of years and finally, with latest advances in neuroscience, we’re finally figuring out why these techniques are so amazing actually.

But to go back to something else that we’ve been doing for millennia is acting. Patrick, you mentioned a moment ago about the fact that I’m an actor and I’ve done some method acting in the past.

And training as an actor is really, really, really wonderful for developing your empathic ability, and that’s because acting is all about living into the experience of a fictional character, which if we think about what design or UX actually is, it’s kind of the same.

We create a persona and this is an archetype, a fictional character with whom we should try to empathize and help other people try to empathize with in such a way that we can actually design better for that persona or that character.

Actors have been doing this for millennia and that’s why I’ve been trying to take, as part of the book, I took a lot of, I stole a lot of techniques from the acting profession and brought them into a design sphere. It’s my mission with this.

And finally, the last thing I’ll say about developing your empathic ability, it’s the simplest and simultaneously maybe the hardest tip that I have for you. It’s just live life. Live life as fully as you possibly can, and what that does is if we can cultivate a diverse set of experiences for ourselves, then that increases our default proximity to other people because our own experience becomes so different and divergent and rich and expansive that it makes it easier for us to relate to other people just from a very organic perspective.

That was empathic ability, but we can also increase proximity, and proximity, again, is the closeness or how closely our experience resembles or is similar to the experience of the person with whom we are trying to empathize.

One way to increase proximity, it’s super simple, just get out of the office. Traditional UXR methods that we talk about, interviewing, observation studies, that kind of stuff, really, it’s a wonderful way to do it and I, again, I really wanna reiterate here that I’m not trying to say that UXR is bad and our traditional methods are just, we need to throw them out.

No, not at all. Those are fantastic things and we need to fight for the privilege and the right to be able to do these within our organizations. But I just wanna bring it into this fold because these are ways also that we can increase our proximity with other people.

Just talking to another person, listening to them without judgment and just hearing their story allows us to glimpse into their world and in a really wonderful way, but another way we can actually glimpse into someone else’s world is by simulating their context.

The photo you see here is actually from a hackathon that I write about in the book, but it was the hackathon that we did to test our idea of a value for a value proposition for the Philips grooming app.

This, it’s an app you can still download. It’s in iOS and Android stores and our thinking was this. For someone who wants to learn more about their facial hair and understand which kind of facial hair styles would look good on them, without having a digital coach, like we created for them, where would they go?

We figured, okay, so after all the research that we did, a lot of people go online. They check out stuff on social media, for example, but a lot of these guys actually go to a barber and just ask for advice.

As our immersion exercise on day one of the hackathon, we invited a legit, as you can see here, dude, tattooed barber with the leather apron and the whole thing, like the stereotypical barber guy that you’d think of. That guy, we invited him to the thing and we had a big barber’s chair there with the Philips logo on it.

I don’t know why, but we had that already, and he actually trimmed and shaved and cut a bunch of our hair and gave a lot of us advice, and the reason why I have a mustache now is actually because that guy looked at my face and he said, “You know what? You have a face that would really look good with a handlebar mustache. I think you should try it,” and I did and I loved it. So thank you to that barber and to that hackathon.

Another way is eating your own dog food. I’ll tell another Philips story. The gentleman that we see in the center with the dark glasses, his name is Andrew Walker, and he used to be the creative director for domestic appliances at Philips, and so he and his team, every week, every Wednesday, I believe it was, they would use Philips products to prepare their lunch and they would eat it all together, and the wonderful thing about that was if they noticed that certain things were very delightful to use or things went really well, then they could actually incorporate that into their marketing messaging.

And if they noticed that things weren’t so good or there was something that wasn’t so nice to use, they could actually get in touch with the folks who were developing those products and get it fixed. This, it’s super simple, super easy, and I would say even prototyping falls under this as well, because if we can create prototypes of a product that doesn’t exist and use it, that firsthand experience, that first-person perspective is really important and really interesting in understanding what it is to be that person who’s using the thing. It’s sort of talking about shifting roles.

Another way to shift roles is actually do role-playing exercises. Patrick, you and I were speaking earlier about interaction improv. It’s a wonderful sort of thing. I write about it in the book and it comes from Stephen P. Anderson. Maybe you know his book, “Seductive UX Design,” or I think “Seductive Interaction Design.” (It’s the latter.)

But in any case, he writes in that book about interaction improv, where one person plays a person using a system or some kind of computer system or an app or software, and the other person plays the software itself, the tool or the appliance or whatever it is, and the thing is, the trick or the challenge, is that the person playing the role of the system is only allowed to speak in ways that the actual system speaks.

If it’s, let’s say, a light switch, you have on and off. That’s all there is. That’s the only thing that that person is allowed to say while the other person’s interacting with them, if that makes sense.

What that really does is it helps to shift the context of use into a much more human-human interaction so that we understand the way that people are going to feel when they’re interacting with a certain software product, but there’s another much deeper way to actually step into the shoes of the person that you’re trying to design for.

I call this become the customer, and no one, I don’t think, has done this in a more interesting way than Drew Manning. The gentleman we see on the slide here, his name is Drew Manning and he runs a website called Fit2Fat2Fit, and as you can imagine, his story, he’s a personal trainer. He helps people learn exercises and get fit and lose weight and that kinda stuff, but he’s been healthy for his entire life.

There’s never been a moment where he was actually overweight or where he suffered from low energy or anything like that. He’s always been healthy. He’s always been very athletic and always been very sporty. At some point, he recognized from himself that he was having trouble really connecting with his customers.

They were maybe having trouble with doing those last 10 push-ups or with performing whatever, pull-ups or whatever like this, and so in order for him to understand what these people are really going through, he took six months off of work and just ate crap. The most unhealthy, most sugary, most whatever, fatty stuff he could find. He just ate crappy stuff for six months.

He even put a YouTube challenge. I think people could send him things that he should eat and then he’d eat it on a YouTube video and post it online. He made a whole thing out of it and it was fantastic, and so as you can see, the middle photo is him after six months of just no working out, just eating crap the whole time, being unhealthy, and this is the first time that he actually experienced what it’s like to be overweight.

And then after that, the six months after that was when he went through his own program to get fit again. The big insight that he gained I think is best summarized in a story about how he at some point wanted to play with his daughter.

He came home from work or from whatever or his daughter came home from school and she wanted to play with him and he just couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy to play with his daughter because he was so tired and so overweight and so unhealthy at that moment that he finally understood that being overweight and trying to get in shape isn’t about muscles or lifting weights or running. It’s about playing with your daughter and having the energy to really live life the way that you wanna live it.

And that insight really helped him in being able to relate to his customers, talk with his customers on their level and be able to communicate with them, and people really trust him a lot more now because they know he’s been through what they go through. Of course, I’m not trying to make, I’m not saying that we should all go through that kind of a process. That’s like a level beyond.

But at the same time, it is interesting for us, especially being the UX people. We’re often the only designer in a team or us being the ones that are at this talk now. How can we help our teams actually experience empathy with us?

The first thing we need, the first absolute foundation of empathy is psychological safety. If people do not feel safe in expressing ideas, then they’re not going to be able to be vulnerable enough to actually try feeling or experiencing an empathic connection with people at work.

Okay, so psychological safety is of the utmost importance in trying to create a culture of empathy at the workplace. Another thing we can do is create characters and tell stories with them. I’ve created this character map canvas. It’s just, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here. I understand that personas already exist and the character map canvas is just something, it’s one of those things that I stole from acting.

I tend to find that personas, a lotta times, and it’s not the fault of personas, but people tend to misuse them in the sense that, for me, a lot of personas have, let’s say, extraneous information, information or data that I don’t have any use for. They don’t inform my design process, but a character map is very focused on, let’s say, the objective.

What is a person trying to do? What are the obstacles that are in their way of actually achieving that objective? What’s their motivation and what other opportunities are there that help me out? And basically, the obstacles and motivation are direct things that I can use that inform my design process. It’s like if we were doing a value proposition canvas, it would be like pain points and gain creators, like those kind of things.

It’s very one to one when it comes to informing the later design process, but I did mention stories. If we have characters and we tell stories about them or tell stories with those characters, then we can also sensitize people to the realities of certain things before we let them loose on an ideation process, for example.

Now what we’re looking at now is what Maria Elena Lopez Reyes calls trigger cards, and these trigger cards are a form of sensitizer that she shares with stakeholders and folks that she works with on her project before they go into an ideation session, and so her project was in Mexico City around survivors of domestic abuse and domestic violence, actually.

And there are organizations that are there to help these victims of domestic violence, the police, there’s social work organizations, but those folks that Maria Elena was working with, they didn’t really have that same understanding about what it actually is to be a victim of domestic violence, so through her research, Maria Elena put together these stories and compressed them into these little tiny trigger cards, which she distributed before ideation workshops and actually talked about in the beginning of the ideation workshop.

It primes the participants of the workshops in such a way that they can be much better informed when they actually start doing their ideation session, if that makes sense. I really like these cards. That’s why I’m going a little bit overboard on it here, but yeah, these are really fun for me.

Another nice way, this is another thing that I really love doing, is just including other people in, let’s say, my research activities or my empathy activities, so silly example is just having development, members of the development team come and observe interviews, for example.

And a lotta times we’re doing remote interviews anyway via Zoom or Skype or whatever, so it’s super easy to just invite other people who stay on mute or they come as just observers only and they just watch what’s going on. It’s even better if they have a job. When I conduct interviews, for example, I like to off-source the note-taking to another person, ideally someone who isn’t a researcher or a designer, so that they have a reason to pay attention during the interview session, if that makes sense.

Other ways to do this are by creating a synthesis wall, what Jon Kolko calls a synthesis wall. Basically it’s just a wall with a lotta stuff on it that you can use to show your work or show your research and show the insights, show what you’re working on so that if someone walks by and is interested by this, they can ask you questions and you can talk about it. It’s a great way to include people.

This works for an office. Obviously it’s not so good for a distributed situation, but we can still do something like a synthesis wall in a distributed situation. For example, if we have a Slack group or an intranet or stuff like that, we can also post updates or share little things out of the project or share new insights and just try to keep bringing people along with us as if they’re part of the team, even if they might not be.

Another thing that’s really nice of what Burton does is that they actually hire their customers. Burton has this thing called Burton Teams or Burton Team, Burton Team, the Burton Team. I’m not sure the exact name, but in any case, Burton Team is a group of elite-level professional snowboarders who get Burton gear and they take the Burton… Burton is a snowboarding company, so they get the Burton jackets and the snowboards and the boots and all that kinda stuff from Burton and use it while they’re out competing and out in the field doing their thing.

But the coolest part about that is that every year, they invite, the founders have a cabin somewhere in the mountains in a wonderful ski place and the co-founders invite Burton Team, so the professional snowboarders, and they also invite their product development teams and they bring ’em all together. I think it’s for a week.

They have a week-long thing. I think it’s called Burton Roundtables and what they do is they play around with new prototypes. They talk about their experiences. They share stories with each other. They go out in the snow and play around with new things, and these snowboarders, these professional snowboarders are actually very tightly involved with designing or developing direction for Burton the next year, if that makes sense, and also the way the products are developed. That’s a really, really wonderful and interesting way to hire your customer in that way.

I’m almost finished with the presentation, but there is definitely one last thing that I’d like to share and it’s about making the right things and making those things right. And it’s just a brief note about ethical design, because what we’re talking about here, this empathic, this Creative Empathy and empathic design can definitely be abused.

It’s powerful. It goes very deep into people’s fears and their desires, and it behooves us to empower people instead of exploiting them.

Because the world, the things that we create are all building blocks in the world that we’re building around us. I’d like to invite you and challenge you and implore you to please let’s build a world that we can all thrive in together.

Thanks so much, and I’m looking forward to the discussion! Hello?

Patrick
It kept me on mute for some reason.

Brian
Oh, sorry.

Patrick
There we go. Thank you so much, Brian. Some great content in there, really enjoyed that, and for me, it was just great to see some depth because I’ve read your book and it’s great to see some of those examples just come to life and some of those photographs and so on, so yeah, I really appreciate that.

Brian
Thank you.

Patrick
We’ve got some questions coming through already.

Brian
Yes!

Patrick
If anyone has any questions, just get them into the chat. If you want to come and join us here on screen, please just reach out to us on Twitter, direct message us. Flavien will handle that.

We’ll give you the link. We can get you in. We’ve got a good few minutes left, so we’d love to get you on to have a bit of a discussion here.

Let’s have a look at some of the comments and questions that we do have, and I do have a few for you as well. I do want to remind everyone that you can download everything that you just discussed and took us through today, all the framework, the content, the canvas, d3e.co/dublinux.

You can download everything from there, which is great. Thank you so much for putting that together. Right, let’s have a look at some of the comments. We’ve got a comment coming in, “Where can we buy the book?”

If you’re lucky, you may win a copy of the book. We do have 10 copies to give away, so hold tight. We are going to do a draw in a few moments. We’ve got some names being selected, so yeah, you may be lucky, but otherwise, how can we get a copy of the book, digital or in hard copy like this?

Brian
Of course. At creativeempathy.eu, you can just go over there and there’s a link to the book page, and yeah, if you want a physical copy, just get in touch with me.

It’s something that’s sort of separate from the publisher because the publisher, Bookboon, is an ebook publisher, so you can get the ebook through Bookboon and the physical one through me. Just send me email with your address and I’ll mail you one.

Patrick
There you are. This is almost like a little bit of an exclusive that we have, the physical copy, so that’s great. Some comments, and this is great from Megan here.

“I also come from an acting background and the character map canvas and persona is such a great way of looking at it,” and you know what? I completely agree. Personas can be quite one dimensional and I think you’re adding so much more depth in there, and I’m not from an acting background at all, so it’s great to see those worlds really colliding. I think that that’s really, really exciting.

Brian
Thank you, Megan.

Patrick
Yeah, very, very good. Let’s have a look and see. Let’s get into some of the questions. Actually, this is a very interesting one. This is more a comment and also a question. Raspberry, I don’t have Raspberry’s full name here, and talks about what you described.

The techniques are really something that’s very similar in yoga, where you learn from empathy by even imitating other people’s behaviors, and this is interesting. The question then goes into you’re imitating, but you’re not really thinking through a logical process, so can you talk about that?

When we use empathy to simulate and we’re using these techniques to simulate and really get into understanding how people feel and how that makes you feel, how does that really relate to the more scientific, logical process, maybe qual or quant research? The question here is, how do you justify using this empathetic approach versus a more scientific, logical approach?

Brian
That’s a great question and I think actually I can answer this question and also Alicja’s question about is there such a thing as too much empathy applied to design. I have actually the same answer for both of those questions, and the answer is that empathy has two components.

In the book, at the end, there’s a chapter or a section on empathy pitfalls, and one of the pitfalls is if we have unbalanced empathy, and what that means is the two components of empathy are affective, so emotional, and cognitive, it’s more rational.

And by going through the different stages of the empathic design process, we’re also shifting perspective. What we’re doing basically when we discover somebody is we’re looking at them from a third-person perspective, and then when we immerse ourselves in their world, it’s more second person, like we’re standing next to them, and in the connect phase, we are putting ourselves in their shoes and relating their experiences to our own as if it’s a first-person thing.

But then when we detach, we’re going back to third person, and the key part about that is we are combining the emotional insights that we have with rational knowledge and understanding, so research is incredibly important, qual and quant, because that gives us, let’s say, the meat or the food that we use to turn insight into empathy in that way.

Does that make sense? And so if we have too much emotional empathy, then it could mean that we designed something that helps one group and totally screws another one over. And if we just have cognitive empathy, then we do a lot with perspective taking and stuff, but then we’re still missing that emotional component, if that makes sense.

Patrick
It’s that balance, really. Is it between affective and cognitive?

Brian
Yes.

Patrick
And I think that’s what I like about that loop, is that you have that detachment at the end. You’ve immersed yourself. You’ve even checked yourself to see how you relate to it, but then you detach, but now you’re armed with, essentially, logical data to a degree because you have observed, you’ve felt and it’s another data point, but as you say, it shouldn’t be the only data point.

There are other data points that you can bring in. That’s why that detachment is quite important. Leave their world and zoom out. When we were talking earlier, I spoke a little bit about this is like systems thinking, where we can zoom in and then zoom right out to the entire system so we can see how people are feeling at particular stages and then zoom right out to see the whole system and see does that person impact someone else, will my change impact the wider system, so I think it’s important to get that context, so that’s fantastic.

Brian
Definitely. Thanks Raspberry and Alicja.

Patrick
And thank you for the follow-up. Raspberry said that that’s great, and technology’s working. Alicja’s commenting live on LinkedIn and Raspberry’s here on YouTube, so we have our multiple networks all connected together, which is great. Let’s have a little look here. Kev, and this is quite interesting, “What is the impact of remote working on generating and enabling creative empathy?”

Brian
It’s a little bit double. On one hand, because we don’t have, or let me say we have fewer opportunities to actually sit physically with a person and talk with them face to face, that can make things a little bit more challenging.

However, because of the, let’s say, remote working and the lockdown that we’ve actually all been through, then it makes these video chats. And I mean, look at us, we’re having an event right now over the internet with video but then live and connected.

This has become much more normal and widely accepted, so remote research methods are also much more easily accepted by research participants, by research stakeholders, with other people in a company, and that, let’s say that it’s almost like a lubricant. It gives us a little bit more easy time in implementing these, let’s say, easier, more scalable methods of research, if that makes sense.

Patrick
Yeah, it does. I’ve got a related question here in relation to the pandemic, so some questions on this, and, “During the pandemic, how have you strengthened your own empathy muscle remotely? Have you found it challenging or has it generated new ideas?”

Brian
Both. It’s been a challenge and it’s generated many more, many new ideas, but okay. I guess it’s kind of two questions. How have I strengthened my empathy muscle recently? I meditate every day. Well, 99%. I miss here and there. Let’s be honest, I’m a human being and fallible.

Patrick
Of course. Yeah.

Brian
And I also, whenever possible, I try to avoid small talk, if that makes sense. If I’m speaking with someone, then I try to ask questions that have some substance and talk about something that’s beyond, “Oh, look at the weather today,” or, “Hey, this coffee’s not so good, huh?” like these kind of surface things.

I try to go a little bit beyond that just because I wanna cultivate and practice this idea of curiosity, just being curious about other people and what makes them tick and understanding that people have these experiences at home that are completely hidden to me just encountering them on the street or in a party or at an event, for example.

And yeah, thinking about new ideas because of going remote. Actually, I went remote slightly before the pandemic, so I’ve been dealing with this challenge actually for a long time and it’s given me a lot of flexibility and freedom because since I don’t have to commute to an office anymore and I have much more control over my day.

That gives me a lot more time to be intentional about practicing empathy, doing yoga in the morning, doing meditation in the morning, having a morning routine that allows me to give myself energy before I actually start trying to work and expend the energy. Yeah, it’s been a challenge, but also very wonderful.

Patrick
That’s great. In relation to strengthening that empathy muscle, there was an example I saw pretty recently. It was someone in my connections on LinkedIn. They got a new role in Deliveroo and I found it fascinating that as part of their standard practice, no matter what role you’re in, you have to get that delivery bag on and you’ve got to go and deliver food.

You’ve gotta go and simulate, not only simulate, you gotta live and experience what it’s like to be a delivery rider and engaging with the restaurants and engaging with the clients when you deliver the food. I thought that was pretty spectacular. This person’s in a very senior position and there they are with a backpack on. I believe the CEO still continues to do that, which I think is pretty incredible.

Brian
That’s so cool. Every company should do something like that, really, yeah.

Patrick
This is an interesting one about cultural barriers. “As UX/UI designers considering creating even more global products, of course, how does empathy break cultural barriers?”

Brian
Hmm. Empathy I wouldn’t say breaks the barrier, but it’s as if the cultural barrier is a wall. Empathy digs a hole underneath it and allows you to come across onto the other side, and the reason why I say that is because, as I mentioned before, human emotion is something that we all have and we all experience emotions in similar ways. I can get sad.

You, Patrick, can get sad. You, Sidnei, can get sad. Alice can get sad. Kev, Megan, Orla, all y’all can get sad, Raspberry. You can all get sad. You can all be happy. You can all, you’ve all laughed at movies. You’ve cried at TV shows.

We share these emotional experiences, and if we wanna think about, so that’s the, let’s say, the more abstract way to answer that question. A more practical way to answer the question is storytelling, and so storytelling is its own, let’s say, science and art.

But the really, really wonderful thing about storytelling is that we human beings, as we are, our paleolithic bodies and brains have evolved in such a way that stories are like a shortcut to our emotional responses, if that makes sense. It’s much easier to cry at a really good movie than it is to cry at a movie that just isn’t put together very well or it kinda sucks or you’re constantly thinking about, “Oh, that acting is really bad,” or, “What’s with the lighting here?” or, “The music doesn’t work,” or, “That doesn’t make sense what this person is doing. That choice is totally bizarre.”

If we can tell stories in an effective way, then that can really help us to get across those cultural barriers because these are things that are just inborn into us, let’s say.

Patrick
That’s great. Let’s look at some other comments we have here. We really have an international audience, so hello from South Africa. You are very, very welcome.

Brian
Hey.

Patrick
And-

Brian
Kalaela, good to see you.

Patrick
Yes. Great to listen to you. Thanks, Brian. Great as always.

Brian
Thank you. Zita, good to see you. Thanks.

Patrick
Good. Rick, a friend of the family who runs Belfast UX, “Traditional personas, do they still have a place in the UX toolkit, or will they only ever be really scratching that surface?”

Brian
Yeah, I think the answer to this question is that you can put any, if we take personas out and put any, like hammer or drill or any kind of tool into that, I think the answer would be the same as any other tool.

It’s just really how you use it, and is a persona what you need for that particular moment and how different really is a persona from a character? It’s just, it’s got different things in it, but sometimes we do wanna know how many kids a person has and how much income they have and what brands they like.

Sometimes we do need to know that stuff, but for me, the projects that I’ve tended to work on in the last few years, that’s been just less relevant information. Yeah, it’s definitely got a place and I think it’s all about how you use it.

Patrick
Okay, perfect. Perfect. We’ve got a deep question here from Orla. “You mentioned a project that involved empathizing with survivors of abuse. What would your advice be for engaging with vulnerable persons or communities in an ethical way whilst conducting that research?”

Brian
I’m gonna reach for Brené Brown on this one. I think the biggest thing that we need to do and keep in mind when we’re dealing with vulnerable people is that we should listen first.

Listening is a huge, huge thing. Just stop talking and listen, really actively listening and also listening without judgment, listening or even observing without judgment. What I notice a lot, and also with myself, I’m a human being, so I have my own baggage and I’ve been raised in a certain context, and so I notice that I tend to judge people about certain things because that’s the way I was raised or that’s the way I’ve lived or these are preconceptions that I’ve developed over my 41 years on this planet.

But the practice of getting away from this judgmental observation and just observing with equanimity, I think that’s the key fundamental mindset that we should have when we are dealing with vulnerable people or even aggressive people, people who might be a little bit dangerous, if some people on the street that might not have our best interests in mind, for example, but listening and being aware and picking up on cues, that is really helpful. I hope that answers the question.

Patrick
I think a tie into that is, with that judgment, mindfulness really helps with that because mindfulness, you’re not really trying to block the thoughts. You’re just aware of them, but you’re not judging them.

You’re letting them flow by. Being completely still is not the aim of mindfulness. It’s just being aware, so I think that that practice is really, really important, and there’s a lotta great tips in the book on how to really, really strengthen that muscle. We’ve got another question here from Alicja and it’s, “What techniques would you choose for a truly low budget project?” Okay. That’s more like research or empathy techniques.

Brian
Yeah, I’m all about that guerrilla style stuff. I love the quick and dirty.

We, Patrick, you and I talked earlier about free writing. I think free writing is one, it costs nothing. It costs a piece of paper and whatever you have to write on, and when I say free writing, there’s two different ways, so free writing just as a general practice to introspect and think about, reflect on how you’re feeling in a specific moment is a great way to flex and train that empathy muscle, especially people, some people journal every day.

I don’t personally, but I maybe think I should start, ’cause a lotta people talk about how great it is to just sit down and take 5 or 10 minutes and just write, and the key about free writing is that you don’t think about it. It’s you set a timer and you just keep going and you cannot stop. If you don’t know what to write, then you’re supposed to write, “I don’t know what to write right now. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

It’s all about the action and keeping yourself in that momentum, but when it comes to proximity, there’s actually another, like free writing in character is a slightly different technique that we can also do, and I hope you don’t mind. Do I have two minutes to tell a real quick story?

Patrick
Go for it. Yes.

Brian
Okay, so it’s a story. It’s in the book, but it’s another Philips story, and while I was working at Philips, I was assigned to a project for Philips AVENT.

And it’s baby, it’s the category baby stuff, and we created an app in which a new, a parent of a newborn baby could collect different kinds of data about the baby, so like what they’ve been eating, breastfeeding, how much they pooped today, or the temperature and all that kinda stuff, and we have different smart devices, like a smart thermometer and like a smart baby bottle and stuff.

But the breastfeeding tracker specifically was something that I, in the beginning, had a lot of trouble connecting with. I never breastfed in my life and I never will breastfeed in my entire life.

So I actually just went to my acting coach and I said, “Look, this is the thing that I’m dealing with right now. How can I engage with these research insights on a more emotional level? How can I really put myself in the shoes of these new parents?”

And she said, “What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna take,” I think it was 10 minutes at the time.

She said, “Take 10 minutes. You’re going to pretend you are a new mom and you’re gonna write a letter to your newborn child, free writing in character, 5 minutes or 10 minutes.” She said, “Don’t stop, don’t think, just keep going and don’t stop until I tell you.”

And my goodness, after wiping my tears away and reading the letter again, it really, it gave me a whole different perspective in my head about the experience around breastfeeding, and it showed me how utterly false the assumptions were under which we were operating at the time.

We were trying to, we were thinking like, “Okay, a mother who’s breastfeeding, she’s bored, so let’s show her some content. Let’s put some articles out there. Let’s give her some things to surf around and click in and let’s make it a little bit more interactive.”

But that’s the last thing a person wants when they’re trying to breastfeed, ’cause the baby might be crying. There’s a phone going off in the corner. There’s some sounds going on outside. There’s so many things going on.

A mom trying to concentrate on getting the baby to latch and concentrating on making that connection and being mindful and present with the baby at that moment. The last thing she needs is distraction and content. She just wants to have a simple interaction. I turn on the timer, I turn off the timer, that’s it. And that’s what I did in the end.

Patrick
And the question was, essentially, how could you do this on a low budget? And that’s a very low budget approach, free writing in character, and of course, it’s about backing that up, because you do want to actually get the evidence behind that. Low budget free writing in character is great, even free writing.

It’s what, think what I’m gonna do is I’m actually gonna use free writing in pairs. I think it’s a great sort of starter for our workshop and especially one that’s gonna be more vulnerable and it’s a technique that you do document and it’s one I’m definitely gonna try out. We’re gonna have a look and see who won the books in a moment, so do stay tuned for that.

We’re going to get into that. I do want to just maybe go to one last question here, which is from Liam. Oh, “Have you ever applied this to the UX in the recruitment process?” Yes. Has the creative empathy process ever been applied? Have you ever done any aspects of this with recruitment?

Brian
I actually haven’t been personally involved in recruiting people. Actually, no. That’s not true. I have recruited folks, but it was before I was actually involved with empathy or thinking about it too much.

But I can imagine that there are definitely interesting things we can do around the recruitment process. For example, eat your own dog food. It could be that if you go through the process yourself, that could also give you a lot of interesting insight and we can see what the actual thing itself is and where people fall off and what doesn’t work, and actually, it reminds me of a story by someone who gave a TED Talk. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of it, but basically I think they were working at IDEO and a hospital commissioned them to understand what the patient experience is, and so what they did was they just got someone, gave ’em a camera and had them lay down in a bed and they had them go through every step that a patient would go through, and so they saw that there was very little contact by nurses and stuff, like this person was being basically left alone, and hospital management had no idea of how this was, and just because they had a video, the senior staff could experience it almost firsthand, so that could be something you could do with the recruitment process.

Patrick
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it’s, do you know what? There’s an opportunity there to really explore. The question really went down to there can be a lot of emotions at that early stage. We have been trying to get someone on camera and I don’t think we’re getting anywhere there.

Flavien, I’m gonna bring you into the conversation here because you’re monitoring all this for us at the moment. There you are. Are we getting anywhere?

Brian
Hey.

Patrick
Are we finding anyone who wants to come on camera?

Flavien
Hi, there. No, I’m afraid we don’t have any direct message, so nobody-

Patrick
No joy.

Flavien
No joy.

Brian
No brave, intrepid souls who wanna come up here and be vulnerable with us?

Flavien
Exactly, so yeah, we need to rethink that process, Patrick.

Patrick
(Laughing) No one wants to come on. Okay, well, you know what? That just means there’s no guaranteed tickets for the conference, so Brian, I’m gonna put you under some pressure in a few moments, and you’ve got access to all the questions in a panel there.

And what I’m gonna get you to do is scroll up and down and I’m gonna get you to select three winners in a few moments. If you’ve asked a question, whether we’ve asked it or not, Brian, you’ve got access to everything. We’ll pick three winners and they will get the lucky three tickets to the conference, so there we are. Flavien, thank you so much for that. We’ll talk later.

Brian
Thanks.

Patrick
Let’s have a look, Brian, at the winners, ’cause we do have some winners here. I’m just going to see what we’re at. We do have some copies of your book to give away, in fact, 10 copies of your book to give away, so thank you so much, very gracious for this. Let’s hit go and this is open to everyone who has RSVPed in the last two weeks since we’ve had this open. Let’s see the first five that we have.

Chau, Ricky, Jelena, Ricardo and Eimear. Congratulations. You’re the first five. You are all gonna get copies. I’ll be reaching out to you on Meetup in the next 24 hours to get your details and you’ve got copies coming to you in the post. Let’s have a look for the next five and see what we have. Okay, here we go. Liam! Liam asked a question.

Brian
Yay.

Patrick
Virginia, Emilia, Jay and Maverick. There you go. That’s fantastic. Those are our winners. Now, no pressure. The Product Elevation, that we do want to give away three tickets worth 100 euro each. Go for it, Brian.

Brian
All right, so Orla asked a question about ethical, ethically dealing with vulnerable people, so I definitely want to choose Orla’s question. Alicja asked two questions, so I wanna actually reward that as well, if that’s possible.

Patrick
Of course.

Brian
And let’s say… Huh. Oh, Crazypedia, what up?! Good to see you here. Yeah, Raspberry, you were also very involved. I have no idea who you are and I suppose that’s by design, but I’d like to also thank you with tickets.

Patrick
Good stuff, Raspberry. I don’t know who you are either, so drop us an email with your Meetup handle and we’ll validate all that. Those are the three winners that we have. Congratulations to the three of you and that’s fantastic.

Brian
Yeah, thanks to everyone who asked questions. Oh, sorry.

Patrick
Oh, most certainly. No, I agree. I’ve got a list of questions to ask you here. We’ve gone way over, so I’m like, I can’t even get to my questions, but that’s just fantastic.

Today’s talk is available now to replay. If you joined us late, you’re watching it live, just hit rewind. It’s available to watch forever up on YouTube and we will do an edit of this down to just the pure talk itself. That’ll be coming out ever so shortly, and of course, we’ve got all the other content up there as well.

If you would like to speak, like Brian has today, reach out to us, goto.DublinUX.ie/feedback. You can give us your details. If you’d like to help out, run in the background, as we come back to in-person events, maybe you’ve got video skills, maybe you’re good at broadcasting these events live because we’re trying to figure out how we deal with this in a hybrid world with some people here, some people there. We know we don’t want to leave anyone out and we need help with this, so yeah, if you’d like to help out, we could definitely avail of your assistance.

If you’re a sponsor, if you’ve got a venue, Zendesk was wonderful. We’ll be reaching out to them again, but if you got a venue, yes, we would love to host our events there, so that’s fantastic. Brian, really sincerely thank you so much for taking part today.

Brian
Thank you.

Patrick
I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, really enjoyed the talk and I’ve really enjoyed just getting to know you as a person as well, so thank you so, so much for everything.

Brian
Thank you, Patrick. This whole process has been wonderful, and really, for anyone who even has a smallest inclination at all to speak, I can say from a firsthand experience, this process has been wonderful. Patrick is just an absolute joy to work with and I really encourage you to, yeah, send him an email.

Patrick
Dude, thank you so much. Appreciate that, and of course, you can download everything today at d3e.co/dublinux, so that’s great. That is it.

This is our last event for this year. We’re gonna take some time off because it’s coming up to the holiday and the Christmas season and I think we could all do with focusing on our families and putting our lives first, so we’ll step back out of this.

We will be back in the new year, probably in January, February. We may just go for February as the first event and we’ll take it from there. Do reach out to us with any suggestions for anything, and yes, stay safe, enjoy the festivities you’re celebrating, and of course, for anyone who is watching today from India and our Indian colleagues,

Both
Happy Diwali!

Patrick
The festival period has kicked off in earnest, yes, and yeah, until the next time, thank you so much for everyone for joining today. Brian, thank you so much. Have a great one. Bye-bye now.

Brian
Thank you, Patrick. Bye.