Empathy Talk with the Visually Impaired in Design Thinking

Empathy -- a core element in Design Thinking -- enables designers to view the world through users' perspective, leading to successful design practices and outcomes. Yet, engineering students tended to prioritize design solutions to satisfy other stakeholders rather than target users. Such misalignment between theory and practice leads to a research question: how today's engineering students generate and are engaged in empathic conversations with users with visual disabilities in user experience (UX) research. Hence, this study aimed at addressing the knowledge gap by analyzing transcripts of interviews administered by engineering students. In addition, transcripts of interviews by one faculty member were included to be compared with the students. The transcripts were coded by using pre-defined themes, including empathic opportunities, opportunity terminators, and empathic responses (naming, understanding, respecting, supporting, and exploring). This study found that the student researchers had a lack of empathic communication skills. Engineering programs should be adequately amended to train and produce engineers who are equipped with empathy and yield effective design solutions to meet user needs. Future research will, thus, focus on designing educational interventions to properly train students to be competent with empathically connecting with participants in Design Thinking.