Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and in today's episode we are talking about empathy. Before we jump into today's episode I want to take a moment and celebrate with you a huge milestone as I already mentioned on Wednesday we passed a huge milestone for this show. We passed 5 million unique listens. Over the life cycle of this podcast the stats are somewhat off but by this time that little bit of margin of error that the stats give us is certainly surpassed and I just want to thank you all for listening to this show on such a regular basis coming back week after week the same people most likely the same people are coming to listen to this show each in every episode so thank you so much for subscribing I want to ask you to share this with someone that you think will appreciate it you know there's 5 million listens but there are certainly more people who could get value out of Developer Tea and the way that they're going to find out about this show is you this show is in your hands in some ways more than it is in my hands so take a few minutes think about who you think may appreciate the values the messages even the sponsors that we have on this show maybe think about a specific episode that impacted you and share that with someone else and that's how that's how you can help this show continue and go to the next 5 million unique listens thank you so much for listening to this show and getting us past that 5 million listen landmark today's episode is going to be no different than the other episodes the show exists once again because I want to start conversations I want to build discussions through a short format podcast the podcast is usually between 10 and 20 minutes long at this point sometimes we have longer episodes particularly the interview episodes if this is your first episode this is a more typical length for an episode today and really we're focusing on one topic today that topic is empathy I want to take a second and describe to you what some people think empathy is empathy for most people is feeling the pain of another person so much so that you almost experience that pain for yourself a lot of times people use empathy as a word to describe someone who is easily affected by another person or is otherwise highly emotionally intuitive and a lot of times empathy is seen only in the positive light when it comes to you for example friendships and another amazing thing about this incredible thing we're going to discuss why it's so important why it's so powerful after the sponsor break but another interesting aspect of empathy is that it's so often it is so often limited or otherwise capped when it comes to you having empathy in a business scenario in other words the idea of empathy is limited when you're in a business scenario there's only so much that you can care there's only so much feeling that you can provide for another person's situation and what I want to do today I want to flip that concept that perception on a Ted and want to tell you that empathy is one of the most important things that you can bring into the workplace and we're going to talk about why right after this quick sponsor break today's episode is sponsored by Dolby when you think of user experience or customer experience what is the first thing that pops to your mind probably the interface the visual elements right amazingly one of the most important things in your application is one of the things that we so often take for granted your audio if you ignore the quality of your audio in your application your application is going to suffer today's users want better audio in fact 90% of digital device users rank sound quality as important across the digital entertainment ecosystem improving your app or your services audio doesn't necessarily mean that you need better audio assets you probably need a better audio codec to be sure your users hear everything Dolby digital plus will give you better dialogue better clarity and it will allow you to deliver a multi channel experience to your projects that means that you're not just doing simple stereo audio anymore the new iPhone 7 series and pretty much the entire apple lineup right now supports the playback of Dolby digital plus audio in video and audio only assets you can check out more about this spec dot of them slash Dolby with the amazing capabilities of the devices that we have constantly on us the devices in our pockets or in our laptop bags or sitting on our desktops these amazing devices deserve more attention when it comes to audio so go and check it out spec dot of them slash Dolby thank you again to Dolby for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So we're talking about empathy in today's episode and it's such an amazing almost a superpower for you to adopt this concept of empathy into your life not only at a personal level will it make you probably a better person but the idea of empathy being a weakness in business is totally backwards it's completely wrong we're going to talk about exactly why in the next couple of minutes I'm going to unpack this idea of what empathy can function as you know we mentioned previously the empathy is about feeling other people's pain really what empathy is actually about it's not just about feeling other people's pain it's about understanding another person's experience and you can start to see how this is going to help you in business but understand another understand another person's experience being able to stand in their shoes not only when they are experiencing pain but also when they are experiencing joy when they are excited when they're frustrated when they are happy when they are content when they feel a sense of urgency all of these things that people go through these experiences that people have practicing empathy puts you in that person's shoes and so if you can start to practice empathy for example for your customers you can start to understand their experience now this is where it all comes into real day to day business decisions if you can practice empathy for your customer base let's say even if you're practicing empathy for a client but let's say you're practicing empathy for the users that are going to be using an application that you are building as a developer you may have certain values that are different from your user bases values and you may have a tendency to build naturally based on your personal values rather than on your user bases values now how do you understand what your user bases values are well certainly there are objective and quantifiable ways of doing this you can go and do user research you can go and do user surveys all of these things are fantastic ideas and they are things that you should do on the flip side aside from quantifiable metrics for example let's say you don't have the user base yet but you have some level of research or some kind of target demographic that you know you are going after one of the ways that you can understand what that target demographic is going to care about is to practice empathy now it's not just a magical term you really have to get to know what that person is experiencing you have to understand their struggles but not only their struggles you also have to understand the things that get them excited the things that make them happy if you can practice empathy at this level you start making value based decisions not on your own values but on your user bases values and we need to make a delineation here we talked about maslow's hierarchy of needs on the show before it's important that we keep this in the front of our mind there are some values that should never be abandoned for example it is very unlikely that any user really wants the type to be difficult to read there are some user factors that can define some of the values that you use in your design decisions and in your software design decisions some of these things are obvious some of these things are very clear to us but some things may not necessarily be as obvious we've talked about how for example a difficult login system may communicate a sense of safety to a user who is logging into that system so some of the things that you may already take for granted as base level values or non-negotiable values these things that we consider maybe related to human factors they can be put up for scrutiny they can be evaluated through this lens of empathy if I want the system to feel secure then maybe an easy login process is not the right way and like most things in life empathy is a skill that must be practiced this is something that you have to start employing in your day to day life this doesn't just apply to when you're thinking about other users but also when you're thinking about your co-workers if you use this concept of empathy to understand how and why they feel about certain things you're going to start making better decisions on behalf of other people and remember empathy was mentioned in step nine of the developer career roadmap when we talked about replacing yourself one of the habits that a great leader always practices is empathy for those that they lead so instead of viewing empathy or maybe you use the word sympathy for a similar concept instead of viewing these things as weakness instead of viewing the idea that caring about another person's feelings or understanding another person or listening to them talk or listening to them complain or celebrating things with them getting excited with another person if those things are currently in your mind labeled as weaknesses or if they come across as weak in a business scenario to your perception then I want you to take some time and think about the value that empathy can provide to you thank you so much for listening to today's episode thank you again to today's sponsor Dolby remember your user's experience is not just about the interface it's also about the audio space that you create go and check out more that Dolby has to offer to you at speck.fm slash Dolby thank you once again for passing over the five million listen mark with me in the show the past couple of months by the way have been the highest listener count for those months that we've ever had on this show so thank you so much for continuing to share for continuing to propagate great discussions and for continuing to work every day to level up in your career thank you so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea