Being a peer writing tutor at the UCWbL has helped me realize the necessity of being an active listener, making people feel seen and heard, and practicing genuine empathy. The empathetic aspect of being a tutor is closely related to my major, User Experience Design (also known as UXD). I like to describe UXD as the love child of graphic design, psychology, computer science, and ethics. Out of a desire to discover any overlaps between UXD and writing center pedagogy, I began my research with the main motivation of seeing how my backgrounds in both could help enhance the other.
Empathy as a UX Designer
In order to truly understand the needs and wants of a user, as well as create more personalized design solutions for a targeted demographic, it is vital to have empathy as a designer. UXD heavily centers around what is best for the client and also a designer’s ability to uncover and translate a user’s implicit needs into a tangible reality.
To extend true empathy towards a user, a UX designer should:
- Consider the user’s context of where and how the user would be using the application
- Actively listen and ask about a user’s state of mind, desires, and needs
- Not get personally attached to their designs, but instead acknowledge that their designs are for the sake of the business and user
Empathy as an UCWbLer
At the UCWbL, building empathy helps writers feel more comfortable with the idea of sharing their writing with a stranger. Out of respect for the writer (UCWbL core value!), our aim as tutors is to accentuate a writer’s writing style instead of meshing our voice with theirs, like how we typically try to refrain from adding our own marginal comments during the first read through of a written feedback. I try to be empathetic as a tutor by:
- Refraining from assuming a writer’s state of mind or abilities
- Not assuming that someone is an EAL speaker unless they explicitly say that they are
- Meeting the writer where they are at and their current level of experience
- Asking a writer where they would like to sit
Quotes on Empathy from Fellow UCWbLers
Emily’s insights directly coincide with how tutors should not pressure themselves with the expectation of being omniscient. It is always important to remember that we are still peers at the end of the day, and can empathize with writers because we often share the same joys and frustrations of juggling school, work, and being social, when we are not at the UCWbL.
As Kaitlyn articulates, being empathetic towards other tutors will also create a holistic sense of community at the UCWbL. The art of empathy is not responding for the sake of responding or filling the silence, rather it is reflecting on being truly immersed in the conversation and having a genuine curiosity to get to know the tutor or writer in front of you.
What is an Empathy Map?
An empathy map is a collaborative visual tool that is used for the purposes of facilitating conversation between UX designers to get the entire team on the same page about the general consensus of a user. It specifically focuses on four quadrants: what a user says, thinks, does, or feels.
The Thinks quadrant focuses on the user’s thoughts about their experience, but it also reveals how there might be a barrier between what users think and may not be willing to vocalize. It raises the question of why a discrepancy might exist and the steps that the UX designer can take to ease the user’s cognitive dissonance or feelings of uncertainty/ self-censorship.
The Feels quadrant encourages the designer to consider the user’s authentic emotional standpoint in relation to how that influences their experience with the service and the extent to which a designer can adjust their design decisions accordingly.
As we learned from Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center”, I believe this empathy map is applicable to the UCWbL because we are trying to develop better writers and not necessarily the specific essay. We can ask the writer more questions to better understand their paper, but also about their writer’s voice, all of which will benefit the writer and the tutor in the long run. By identifying this as tutors, we practice our core value of transparency.
Collaboration as a UX Designer
Collaboration is an integral facet of the UXD process, especially considering the industry’s interdisciplinary nature that combines the forces of designers, developers, and market insight researchers. Unless you are a UX unicorn, it is crucial to collaborate with and respect everyone on the team even if designers and developers might frequently get on each other’s nerves due to differing approaches.
UX designers often utilize an iterative process called Agile software development, which encourages designers to work collaboratively with fellow designers, but also team members in other disciplines. The entire team shares a common goal of delivering a cohesive product to the user.
Benefits of Agile
- Designers and developers share a mutual understanding and method of communication about the same product with multifaceted mindsets due to using standardized Agile terminology
- Agile often encourages daily stand-up meetings where the entire team meets for a quick status report
- Utilizes a strategy of user stories, which take the structure, “As a [user], I want to [task], so that [benefit]”, and aid the team in having a better understanding of what the user wants
Writing Center Collaboration
I interviewed Grace Pregent, current Associate Director of the Writing Center at Michigan State University. After we talked, I realized the extent of how important collaboration is at a writing center. Pregent looks at her writing center work from a trauma-informed care, gender-based, and social justice framework.
Her unconventional, innovative lens of writing center pedagogy began when a tutor confided in her about an appointment where the writer presented an inflammatory paper. Following that situation, she began posing questions such as, “what policies are there in place to make workplaces safer?” She explained that this puts tutors in a privileged position and raises many vital questions around reporting and collaborating with trained consultants. Pregent emphasized the necessity of actively creating an empathetic, communal culture at a writing center.
UXD and writing center work share the common core of collaboration among people who possess many different skill sets and foundations. Some Agile methodology elements are strongly connected to the UCWbL in the sense that we are not just a writing center that operates independently from the rest of campus. We interact with the entire DePaul community, running the gamut from assisting health and sciences students with their lab reports to helping an EAL speaker with their English to make them feel like a boss at their upcoming job interview. The heart of collaboration across multiple backgrounds is to enhance the experiences of users and writers alike.
Final Thoughts
As of right now, I don’t have a lot of opportunities to deeply converse with the users that I am designing for. However, working at the UCWbL gives me a platform to meet more people and often assist writers in uncovering their writing needs even before they are able to recognize it themselves. I feel that being a writing tutor will help me immensely with my career as a UX designer due to the similar customer service aspect and initial rapport building with writers. I hope my research into the unexpected parallels of user experience design and writing center pedagogy have given you more insight into the arts of collaboration and empathy.
References
Icons8. “Empathy in UX Design: What It Is and Why It’s Important.” Medium, UX Planet, 19 Mar. 2019, https://uxplanet.org/empathy-in-ux-design-what-it-is-and-why-its-important-3f6a8919ef10.
Memon, Masooma. “16 Important UX Design Principles for Newcomers.” Springboard Blog, 19 June 2019, https://www.springboard.com/blog/ux-design-principles/.
North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, p. 433., doi:10.2307/377047.
Pregent, Grace. Personal interview. 06 Nov 2019.
World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience. “UX Research, Training, and Consulting.” Nielsen Norman Group, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/.