Culture of Empathy Builder:  Jon Kolko

Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love
Well Designed presents Kolko's process for building and shipping powerful, emotionally resonant offerings. This process has four steps: (amazon)

Chapter 1: By Design
Chapter 2: Product/Market Fit: Finding Broad Appeal
Chapter 3: Behavioral Insights: Identifying Latent Needs and Desires
Chapter 4: Product Strategy: Sketching a Playbook of Emotional Value
Chapter 5: Product Vision: Crafting the Product Details
Chapter 6: Shipping
 

 

Using Empathy to Create Products People Love

"HBR senior editor Jeff Kehoe talks with Jon Kolko, founder and Director of the Austin Center for Design, and VP of Consumer Design at Blackboard, Inc. They’ll discuss the need to redefine design thinking, as well as concrete methods for creating emotional appeal in new products, and the companies that are doing this well. "

How to put empathy at the core of the design process

"Empathy-led. Given this shift, Blackboard has taken on a massive overhaul of our products. We're transitioning from a "requirement-led" process to an "empathy-led" process."

Design Thinking Comes of Age

"A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture."

A Process for Empathetic Product Design - APRIL 23, 2015
"The discipline of product management is shifting from an external focus on the market, or an internal focus on technology, to an empathetic focus on people. While it’s not too difficult to rally people around this general idea, it can be hard at first to understand how to translate it into tactics. So in this article, I’ll walk through how we applied this approach to a particular product at a start-up, and how it led to large-scale adoption and, ultimately, the acquisition of the company."

For Any Product to be Successful, Empathy Is Key - NOVEMBER 20, 2014

"But what you really need to create a good product is empathy, and empathy isn’t about intellectually knowing – it’s about feeling. To feel what Mary feels, you need to spend time with her, learn about her specific wants, needs, and desires, and get to experience her emotions. In the world of design-led product innovation, pursuit of empathy is the key to success. To reap the benefits of the other ‘e’ words that we hear so much about when it comes to creating products (experience, engagement, and emotion), you need to have empathy with the people who will buy, use, and experience your products or services. "

Jon Kolko - Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

"Industry disruption is possible by focusing on providing deep, meaningful engagement to people that use your products or services. This is achieved by designing products that seem as though they have a personality, or even a soul. In this talk, you’ll learn how to achieve this, by leveraging design in a product management capacity. You’ll learn an end to end process that uses empathy to create products people love."
 

Using Empathy to Create Products People Love – Interview with Jon Kolko

"In this interview with Jon Kolko, author of ‘Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love’, we discuss his design-focussed product development process. "

Transcript

Jon Kolko on Empathy in Design at #BbWorld15

Our products have been redesigned from the ground up, but why? Because we're designing with empathy. Vice President of Design Jon Kolko explains what that means and how we're putting it into action.
 

Jon Kolko - Using Empathy to Create Products People Love
 

In this interview with Jon Kolko, author of ‘Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love’, we discuss his design-focussed product development process. We cover how to get and use feedback, how to know what feedback to focus on, the importance of building products with personality and how non-designers can learn more about product design.