Empathy Village - UX Design

Empathable strives to bring empathy to its users by allowing them to experience life from someone else’s shoes. Through point-of-view videos, users are exposed to real-life scenarios that allow them to understand another perspective. The user has the opportunity to reflect by answering questions in a video response. This series of interactions is called a Path.  

The Empathy Village will allow users to interact with “citizens” of the village to hear more perspectives. This feature is planned for a later version of the app so this project involved preliminary conversations regarding the possibilities this feature could offer.

The competitor research I conducted was examining the way other apps show navigation and maps. The idea behind the empathy village is that users can scroll through an interactive village to meet people in various locations. The types of interactions I gathered were level trackers in games and navigational maps.  

A few considerations we discussed was the way these interactions are intended to teach users empathy. With this in mind, we didn’t want users to equate this experience to leveling up in a game - in a linear fashion.

After talking through the various map interactions, the horizontal scroll seemed like the best way to capture the story we wanted users to experience while keeping development efforts low. By allowing users to freely explore the Village once they complete enough Path interactions, they are not tethered to a linear experience. 

We wanted to explore the initial flow the user experiences in the Empathy Village. Once the user completes their first Path, they will unlock the Empathy Village and get to meet their first “citizen.” In order to retain incentive, the user would need to continue exploring more Paths in order to continue their interactions with people in the Village. 

As we discussed the way users would interact with the Empathy Village, we wanted to explore integrating video content and a social interaction. The plan for the video content would be to show a more casual recording of someone telling a story. Users would be able to comment their thoughts and like videos to save them for later. Another opportunity to take advantage of the liking interaction is that it might allow us to group users together based on the videos they like. This could foster discussions among co-workers who are going through the Empathable experience together.

Since this was a condensed project to align with the timeline of my Indsutry Design Project, the outcomes and results have not been collected through testing yet. However, I did write a few questions to use in testing.  

Would you be interested in exploring the Empathy Village to meet people in various locations? 

What kinds of stories would you engage with? 

How would you use a social interaction within the Empathy Village?

Working on this project was very rewarding. I had the opportunity to collaborate with the founder of Empathable, a UX designer, and another UX intern. I'm looking forward to seeing this interaction develop.