Empathy is in.
But bringing empathy to your product design takes more than talking the talk, walking the walk or feeling the feel.
Unless you specialize in telepathy, customer empathy requires a direct connection to your users’ experience, either by observation and interaction with them on their own turf, or by personal immersion in the same experience.
If you instead stay a wannabe telepath, you may go the route of these well-meaning companies that ended up offending, alienating, hurting - and sometimes actually killing - their customers.
Pinky Gloves
Let’s start with the grossest and most ridiculous example in this lineup. In April 2021, two male founders received 30K EUR funding on the Dragon’s Den reality show for a product supposedly meant to help women. How? By helping them “cover up embarrassing evidence” of menstruation when they threw away their tampons or pads.
The product was a standard latex surgical glove in hot pink with a cutesy heart printed on it.
So much WTF. Source: Twitter
The faux pas were almost too many to count, and immediately caused an outcry from insulted women around the world who saw the product as a way for men to charge women more for a pink decorated surgical glove, while at the same time shaming them for menstruating.
Where did this idea come from?
The founders “had claimed on TV to understand women because they had been married and had lived with women as housemates. From their experience, they had come across period products in the bin. ‘After a while, it just smells unpleasant,’ Raimkulow told the investors.”
Mm-hm. Who needs help dealing with the consequences of menstruation? It doesn’t sound like it’s the women. Maybe a “pinky bin freshener” for men would have done better.
Juicero
This California-based startup marketed itself to health-conscious consumers as a high end, convenient and fresh way to make healthy fruit and veggie juices at home. In 2016-2017, the company swiftly raised $120M, priced the internet-enabled device at $400 plus fruit cartridges, and launched to much fanfare… until customers started releasing videos showing that you didn’t need the device to make juice. You could buy the pricey Juicero cartridges and squeeze them with your hands.
But Juicero couldn’t (or wouldn’t) appreciate that customers who had plunked down a few hundred bucks felt ripped off. Instead, company CEO Jeff Dunn hoisted the flag of empathy high with poetic rhetoric about the true value of the Juicero machine for busy parents and professionals:
“The value is in how easy it is for a frazzled dad to do something good for himself while getting the kids ready for school, without having to prep ingredients and clean a juicer. It’s in how the busy professional who needs more greens in her life gets app reminders to press Produce Packs before they expire, so she doesn’t waste the hard-earned money she spent on them.”
Now, I can feel empathy for a CEO who sees his company about to tank. But not when his own claims of empathy ring so hollow. I’m willing to bet that a fancy, demanding machine is the last thing on the mind of a frazzled dad making school lunches.
Lululemon yoga pants
You would think that a women’s fitness clothing company would maybe just try to understand women’s body image issues. But when Lululemon’s Luon yoga pants were found to be see-through during workouts, founder and Chairman Chip Wilson effectively blamed customers’ bodies: "Frankly, some women's bodies just don't actually work [for the yoga pants].” This lack of empathy (not to mention tact) is likely a large part of the reason why Chip Wilson is no longer on the board of the company he founded.
Strangely enough, in Wilson’s subsequent open criticisms of the company, one was the lack of women in management roles: "When we let go of the last CEO and her people under her, that team was filled by men, and I think it's really, really sad. Lululemon is missing a hell of an opportunity, because I think unless you are the market, you can't sell to the market.”
You don’t say.
Boeing
Sometimes UX fails can be deadly.
Two separate airplane crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 involved Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, equipped with some adjustments to a relatively new feature set: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).
While this feature was supposed to help with the aircraft handling, Boeing violated several key usability principles in its integration:
Changing key elements of the aircraft design without fully informing the users
Not representing the new system in the flight manual or flight simulators
Not representing the new system in the UI (airlines buying the aircraft were asked to pay extra to have a signal for the MCAS installed in the cockpit dashboard)
After hundreds of people had perished in the resulting crashes, Boeing management showed an utter lack of empathy about their original lack of empathy; they denied that there was any design problem and instead blamed pilots for not responding appropriately to the situation.
I just can’t even with this.
The primary flight display of a Boeing 737-800 aircraft with the “angle of attack” (AoA) display on the upper right. A text message would alert the pilot that there was problem with the AoA, and the pilot would need to know how to act accordingly to prevent a crash. After the crashes, it was revealed that this alert was an extra paid feature and many airlines, not fully aware of what it did - hadn’t activated it. Source: Wikipedia
Robinhood
This other deadly UX fail affected only one individual, but it isn't any less sad.
Alex Kearns, a 20 year old trader on the popular stock trading platform Robinhood killed himself after reading on the app that he had a $730K negative balance. Had he really lost $730K? No… the type of options trading he was engaged in could show a low balance at certain stages before the gains balanced it out.
Robinhood made the claim that nobody could have seen this coming but, honestly: how many years has it been that Forex sites have been known to drive some users to suicide? Those suicides are due to the exact same feature set pitfalls as stock trading lends itself to - similar features to what Robinhood had built into their platform.
Kearns’s cousin commented on the glaring UX issue: “Tragically, I don’t even think he made that big of a mistake. This is an interface issue, they have slick interfaces. Confetti popping everywhere… They try to gamify trading and couch it as investment.”
Unlike Boeing, however, Robinhood management decided to apply the lessons learned from the incident, and several days later announced major changes to the platform, including:
More educational resources about the nature and mechanics of options trading
A new company position of “Options Education Specialist”
Better messaging about the results of options trading
Someone shouldn’t have to die for empathy to get highlighted as a company concern, but at least now it’s taken seriously.
Bic For Her ballpoint pens
After years of success with their pink razors (now facing backlash over the “pink tax”), Bic decided in 2012 to produce a line of pink colored pens and market them to women. Why? Supposedly the transparent design made them “sleek”, feminine and, of course, slightly more expensive than the standard colors.
This epic fail will forever be remembered for its Amazon reviews, which are so hilarious that you could easily spend your afternoon reading hundreds of them. Tap that link - I kid you not, you won’t regret it.
McDonalds McDLT
Empathy fails don’t always have to be about super sensitive issues, or about human suffering per se. In many more mundane cases, companies can simply avoid a lot of wasted effort by using the basic ideas of empathetic product development to decide if a product should even exist. The McDLT is a great example of a product that at first glance seems to make sense… yet flopped so completely that it makes you wonder: just how hard would it have been for a large corporation like McDonalds to spend on customer research just a fraction of what they clearly spent marketing this “innovation”?
Questions like:
How many people truly care about the cold parts of the burger staying cold?
Would this new styrofoam container be the best way to solve that problem?
…are exactly the kind of thing McDonalds should have gauged before going all-in. Eventually, environmental activists succeeded in getting this unpopular product off the menu completely, because of the amount of styrofoam it used. Tap the video above to watch pre-Seinfeld George Costanza belt out a song about a problem that we all didn’t really have.
How you can avoid empathy fails in product design
If you don’t want to be the newest addition to this list, apply the following four lessons in every product development process:
Ideally, involve the people you are trying to help in your product’s development process, so you don’t unwittingly alienate them. Have them on your founding team, on your board, or in your focus groups and communities, and listen to what they have to say.
Spend a lot of time with your audience to understand their point of view, getting to know them and asking questions to determine if your assumed pain point actually pains them at all.
Gauge from their feedback how acute the pain point actually is, and how they feel about it, before jumping in with your proposed solution.
Even if you’ve been doing this for a while, don’t assume that you now know more about how to solve a pain point than your audience does: you will only know that if they consistently buy your product - and even then, you still have what to learn!
Empathy fails may seem inevitable if so many big brands with big bucks stumble in it, but it’s actually not that hard to avoid these flops. The key is approaching product design with humility and an open mind.
In short, basic human decency plus actually respecting your target customer goes a long, long way.
Who’d have thought?