Great researchers know that it’s not enough to simply understand user’s current behaviour – what they are doing.  You need to understand how the user’s current experience is shaped by the context of use, their task and experience goals, their frustrations and their emotional pain-points.

To achieve this a researcher must be able to empathise with the participant – to understand not only what participants are doing, but also what they are thinking and feeling…objectivity and impartially.

Prejudices, preconceptions, norm and values must be discarded.  To properly understand their motivations and attitudes, researchers must see the world from the user’s perspective; to climb out of their own and their client’s echo chamber and ask the right questions of the right people in the right way – appropriate to the context.

This is not about gathering information on requirements, it’s about solving user problems by placing yourself in their reality and seeing the world from their perspective.  These users may not have the faintest idea what solutions are possible, so don’t ask them what they want or ask how they want to get there.  Instead understand where they want to get to.  It’s the job of the researcher to use creative research techniques to extract insights and lay out the path of opportunities that can lead to prototype solutions.

If there’s one thing critical to achieve this, it’s empathy.

This holds wherever creativity is required.  As Susan Sarandon observed; “When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.”