Prototyping with Empathy

Healthcare brings together people who care deeply about supporting others during challenging times. Translating that empathy into the physical environments where care happens requires intentional techniques, regardless of your role. Here are approaches that create truly empathetic spaces: Observing Beyond the Obvious Watch the Transitions - Don't just observe the main event. Watch the family member who gets lost returning from the cafeteria, the nurse searching for supplies between patient rooms. These in-between moments reveal where empathy is most needed. Notice the Workarounds - When staff tape signs over official wayfinding or families create makeshift privacy barriers, they're showing you where the space fails. These adaptations are acts of empathy. Observe Across Time - A space that works at 2pm may fail at 2am. Consider the night shift nurse, the anxious family waiting through surgery, the patient who can't sleep. Listening Differently Ask About the Hard Days - "Tell me about a day that didn't go well here" reveals what people actually need when things are difficult. Listen for What's Not Said - When someone says "it's fine" but their body language says otherwise, you're learning about unmet needs they may not feel comfortable naming. Create Space for Unexpected Voices - The environmental services worker knows things clinicians don't see. The family member who stayed overnight has insights day staff miss. Experiencing the Environment Walk the Journey - Physically walk from parking through registration to appointment, experiencing every confusing sign, every uncomfortable wait, every moment of uncertainty. Sit in the Waiting - Spend real time in waiting areas. Feel the anxiety. Notice the lack of privacy. Experience the acoustic chaos. Empathy requires feeling, not just seeing. Try the Space During Distress - Navigate wayfinding while upset. Have a private conversation in a "private" space. Test whether someone could cry without everyone noticing. Engaging with Complexity Seek Out Conflicting Needs - The family who needs to talk versus the patient who needs quiet. Empathetic design acknowledges and manages these tensions. Design for the Everyone - True empathy means considering cognitive differences, cultural practices, sensory needs, and varied family structures. Consider the Staff Experience - Burned-out staff can't provide emotional support. Spaces that sustain caregivers support better patient care. Translating Understanding into Action Prototype with Real Users - Mock-ups with actual patients, families, and staff reveal what works before construction begins. Design for Dignity - Does this preserve privacy during exposure? Maintain autonomy during dependence? Support connection during isolation? Return and Learn - Visit completed projects after occupancy. Empathetic design includes the willingness to learn from mistakes.

I've found empathy mapping most valuable during early project phases and presentations. Nothing convinces leadership to greenlight a project like showing them you truly understand your target audience's pain points. But, they're not for every situation. For straightforward projects with well-understood users, a quick check-in might be sufficient. The key is using empathy maps as tools for insight, not checkbox exercises. I've seen firsthand how they break down communication barriers between departments. The beauty of empathy mapping lies in its simplicity. The classic version has four quadrants – Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels — though I've found adding "Sees" and "Hears" can provide even more context for certain projects. What matters isn't the exact format but the conversations it sparks. Here's what works in my experience: - Start with a clear purpose. Are you trying to align your team around user needs? Inform a specific design decision? The goal shapes everything that follows. - Ground your map in reality. The most valuable maps come from actual user data – interviews, surveys, support tickets – not assumptions. I've watched teams realize how much they'd been projecting their own preferences onto users when confronted with real feedback. - Make it collaborative. Bring together people from different departments to fill out the map. The magic happens when your developer suddenly realizes why that feature the marketing team kept pushing for actually matters to users. - Keep it alive. The best empathy maps evolve as you learn more. I keep ours visible and revisit them regularly, especially when we're making crucial decisions.

What building for new parents taught me about product design 👶🏼 Most products are built assuming one thing: That the user is at their best. Focused, in control, and ready to explore. But parenthood turns that upside down. When you're holding a newborn at 3AM, you’re not looking for smart features. You're looking for clarity, comfort, and someone you can trust. That’s the first big lesson I learned as a founder in the mom and baby space. You’re not just building for a user. You’re building for a vulnerable life stage. Here’s what shifts when you do that: ↳ Emotions run high ↳ Time is scattered ↳ Every decision feels heavy ↳ The mental load is already overflowing ↳ Trust becomes everything So what matters more than classic “differentiators”? The experience. The empathy. The ability to make someone feel just a little less alone. In this space, I’ve learned to value: ↳ Simplicity over features ↳ Reassurance over polish ↳ Flexibility over funnels ↳ Conversation over conversion Because for a new parent, even a small friction can feel like failure. And a gentle helping hand can feel like a lifeline. If you’re building in parenting, healthcare, mental wellness, or any space where emotions run deep, it helps to set aside the traditional playbook and begin with this question: How can I show up with care? I’d love to hear from others. What has empathy-led design looked like in your journey? Let’s swap stories.

Prototyping is how ideas turn into evidence. It surface hidden assumptions, generate better stakeholder conversations, test specific hypotheses, reveal unforeseen interactions, and give you a concrete artifact to evaluate before code or tooling locks you in. Use low fidelity sketches and storyboards when you need speed and divergent thinking. They help teams externalize ideas, reason about user goals, and map flows before pixels appear. They are deliberately rough to avoid premature polish. Move to click through wireframes in Figma when the question is structure and navigation. Validate information architecture, menu depth, labeling, and path efficiency while changes are still cheap. When the feel of interaction matters, use interactive digital prototypes to evaluate micro interactions, timing, and visual polish. Treat them as validation instruments, not trophies. Plan change criteria up front so attachment to a pretty artifact does not silence real feedback. Some questions require real performance and materials. Coded prototypes and functional hardware mockups tell you about latency, reliability, durability, ergonomics, and safety. In medical devices and other regulated domains, high fidelity functional and contextual testing is expected for Human Factors validation. Not every question lives on screens. Experience prototyping and bodystorming put bodies in space to surface constraints that lab tasks miss. Acting out a shared autonomous ride with props reveals comfort, cue timing, and social norms. Wearing a telehealth mockup for a week exposes stigma, routine friction, and alert patterns that actually fit domestic life. Before building intelligence, simulate it. Wizard of Oz studies let a hidden human drive system responses while participants believe the system is autonomous. You learn vocabulary, trust dynamics, acceptable latency, and recovery strategies without heavy engineering. AI of Oz replaces the human with a large language model so you can study conversational realism early. Manage risks like model bias, hallucinations, and outages with guardrails and logging so findings remain trustworthy. Strategic prototypes also matter. Provotypes and research through design artifacts challenge assumptions, surface values, and force early conversations about privacy, power, and trade offs that slides tend to dodge.

Every bad product starts the same way: with a good guess. Before diving in, you have to understand the problems on their terms, not yours. And it starts with Empathetic Observation. 5 steps to understand what you're fixing: ________________ Step #1: Kill your inner solutionist before you start • Write down all your assumptions • Document what you think is broken • Acknowledge your biases explicitly • Lock these away until observation ends I call this "solution quarantine." ________________ Step #2: Embed yourself as the least important person True empathetic observation means becoming invisible. Don't watch as a consultant or founder. Become the intern, the assistant, the helper. The ‘lowest-status’ role reveals the most truth, because nobody performs for the new assistant. They just work. ________________ Step #3: Document the "why" behind every "What" Most observation fails because founders document activities, not reasons. Here's how to watch with empathy: • See a workaround? ↳ Ask what it's solving • Spot frustration? ↳ Understand the constraint • Find complexity? ↳ Trace the history • Observe ritual? ↳ Learn the purpose ________________ Step #4: Find the hidden logic in "illogical" behavior Empathetic Observation assumes everyone is rational within their constraints. Your job is to find those constraints: • Technical limitations they've accepted • Political dynamics you don't see • Historical decisions still affecting today • Resource constraints they work around Even the "dumbest" behaviors have logical reasons. ________________ Step #5: Test understanding before building solutions The final step most founders skip: validation without solutionizing. Before you build anything: • Explain their workflow back to them • Predict their pain points accurately • Anticipate their workarounds • Describe their logic convincingly If they say "Yes, exactly!" you're ready to build. If they say "Well, sort of..." you need more observation. Empathetic Observation feels slow because it is slow. It feels inefficient because you're not building. It feels ‘pointless’ because you're learning instead of doing. But those 100 days of observation save you from 1,000 days building the wrong thing. __________________________ Hi, I’m Prem. I’m a multi-venture founder building Tandem, the all-in-one pet healthcare system. We’re fixing the broken experience of modern vet care by combining AI, clinics, and pharmacy into one seamless care platform.

SXSW London! This week I presented "Empathy is the source for all great design" to a full room (400 people turned away because no additional space-darn!). I was left with a feeling that many in the creative class are in a crisis of change, with concerns about trust, erosion of accepted norms of integrity, AI displacing employment and anxiety about a collapse of empathy. Well! 100 years ago (almost precisely), Louis Kalff (the first Global Head of Design for Philips) penned the title of my talk. There are 4 key tools that bridge the empathy gap: 1.   Direct observation – there is no substitute for seeing customer pain points right where they are. Don’t listen – WATCH. People are notoriously unreliable at telling you what’s wrong and what their pain points are. This is particularly true for hospital workflows. 2.   Work backwards from the customer - Answer these key 5 questions: Who is your customer? What is their pain point or need? What benefit will our solution bring them? How do we know we are right and was this validated? What does it looks like? SHOW me the prototype. As Dennis Boyle from IDEO told me years ago, Don’t schedule a meeting unless you have a prototype to show me. :) 3.   Co-Create DIRECTLY with your customers – Don’t outsource your strategy to an agency. Work directly with your customers and solve their problems together because every customer is different and you will fail early to succeed sooner. 4.   Psychological Safety – One of the things I learned from the design (spaghetti tower) challenge that I presented at TED in 2006 is that the highest performing group of all (kindergarteners), succeeded over the worst performing group of all (business school students). Why? The kinders don’t spend half their time arguing about who is going to be CEO of spaghetti corporation. They just build and learn faster. Thesis: Status transactions are the death of innovation and leaders need to serve their teams and leverage that quiet brilliance of the introverts. And as a closing message I shared one of the key lessons in my quest to unlock the creative potential of other people: Invest in putting others above yourself – you will be rewarded. There is no win and no fail. There is Only MAKE.