Empathy is All Wrong, Against Empathy: A Totally New Research Approach You Need Now
Mettā versus Meta
Summary
In B[e]y[ond] Human Design, we lay out the need and possibility for a theory of change that extends and cares for more than just end human users. We begin to tease out the final section of that piece, “Motivating the need for difference, an ethics (and beyond),” outlining shortcomings with simply expanding the current industry (UX/UI/service design/etc.) frameworks to more than the human, especially in regards to the challenges with extending empathy alone. We outline where we believe complications lie, revealing that it does not appear to be as simple as pushing our framework outwards. Instead, it may require deeper restructuring of the field to accommodate this greater need.
Background
Duolingo made waves in the user experience (UX) community with the “rebranding” of the company’s UX activities.1 That which formerly fell under the auspice of “UX” is now affixed with the label “Product Experience.” As Mig Reyes, VP of Product Experience at Duolingo, put it,
Duolingo is a product-led company. Product drives our business, culture, and priorities. Our function includes Product Designers, Product Writers, and Product Researchers. We gave the umbrella name “UX” a shot. It never stuck. It didn’t feel like us. It felt… antiquated.2
The name change itself is not unprecedented. Tech has long been an industry that values “innovation,” “distrusts and breaks tradition,” and “honors competition,” while trying to uplift and pick out “Superstars.” Medium and LinkedIn served as the perfect backdrop for this work, platforming frequent iterations to the theory, processes, and tools that fuel tech. There is a lineage of writing quick, tidy articles that shook the foundation of the field and questioned what seemed fixed, all at the hope of cementing yourself as a “Thought Leader” of the likes of Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs—a “Disruptor.” The constant iterations and breeding of thousands of minute changes to theory mirrored the complexities of each researcher and designer’s personal design philosophy. Without a grand theory, the field may appear unstable; this could be the case, but these meta-posts also, in many ways, captured the spirit of the venture. Thousands of posts swimming amongst themselves—portions discarded, portions picked up and carried on, portions reimagined. It reformed the discipline and rebuilt it on the very principles that guided it.
The meta-work also blurred the lines of responsibilities. It is commonplace to see the titles “UX Researcher,” “UX Designer,” “UI Designer,” “Product Owner,” “Product Manager” being used rather interchangeably. Admittedly, there has always been a tremendous amount of overlap in these roles’ expectations. Reyes went on to acknowledge these challenges.
Our industry seems unsure about what to call ourselves. UI? UX? Split the difference with a forward slash down the middle? UI shapes a user experience, and UX serves a product. Yet it’s the product that matters most. We’re confident we’re product people.3
There is complexity to an industry that bred and encouraged constant iterations, but Duolingo’s innocuous rebrand reveals a misunderstanding of the very principles that guide UX. Product does drive Business, and UX was never free from the confines and needs of the Business. The difference lies in UX’s commitment to user-centered design. User experience (UX) is fundamentally concerned with and driven by users, not the business, while still understanding the landscape in which it operates. Reyes’ use of “antiquation” feels timely as tech makes an ouroboric turn further unto itself—fully capitulating to its past confidantes of neoliberalism and the military-digital complex.
UX may “serve a product,” but that’s a gross simplification of what it captures. It’s not perfect, but it was a smuggling. By closely tethering itself to capitalism, it was allowed to grow. Its process floated a no-brainer to survive—“if the customer is satisfied, the business will be more profitable.” Now, businesses seem less aligned with this aphorism; in the face of TikTok and other discovery-driven content-based platforms, manipulating the user is better than satisfying them. Why sell users a good product if you can just make them addicted to it? It’s not creating a product for the user; it’s shaping the user to a product—positioning the product over the user. More scrolling = more engagement = more revenue. “Product Experiences:” feeding the user, anesthetizing them, closing and shortening positive feedback loops, gamifying metrics— in short, forcing an addiction to the platform.
To those critical of all things bred from tech, especially in light of the rather dark portraits painted of our technocratic future, [UX] user-centered design processes are still valuable despite what they are entangled in. UX in industry is a process influenced and unable to be fully untangled from profit maximization, but this has made the process and tools efficient, trimmed down, while still capturing the heart of the venture. It is systematized outsourced decision making at scale. The approach offered by user-centered design can be appropriated. Outside of tech, it provides actionable pathways forward for anyone, anywhere to seize the tools, take up the process as their own, and make changes to their environment. It makes the chaos and seemingly insurmountable process of change more intelligible and within grasp for all. To dispose of it is to not see what it offers, a dismissal on its simple proximity to that which we more and more expressly rebuke.
Without betraying the ethos that guides UX, there is a substantiated need for improvements within the field. A need to build anew, especially in these uncertain times. We don’t just advocate for a recovery and appropriation of the techniques for social change, but we also seek to empower and reform these theories within tech, especially with the increasing power of the private sector.
It’s not a matter of being unsure of our name, but a matter of being sure of what and who it is we serve, and how best to serve them.
UX [derived from user-centered design] offers a theory of change, a commitment to others. We recognize the need to adapt, without betraying the foundation from which we were built or discarding a theory because of its proximity to that which we despise. We also recognize its limitations; our goal is to extend this understanding to other beings. Allow the full unfolding of the theory, that which wasn’t allowed under the mechanisms of profit maximization.
To summarize our earlier publication, a foundational pillar of human-centered research and design falls on the principle of “leading with empathy” or employing an empathy-first mindset. Designing for and being responsive to users requires researchers and designers to relate to and understand their users. Historically, designers have been responsive to end [human] users' needs, but often overlook other beings affected by their products, services, and systems. We offered an expansion to encompass more than the human end user in order to create products, services, and systems that more adequately advance the public interest. This expansion seems difficult without touching the empathy-first mindset that fuels UX work. As we put it,
Empathy is great, but as we see it, it is also built upon sameness. While the conditions and situations may be different, it requires a designer to connect with some universal feeling. We fear this downplays the importance of difference and codifies everything in purely human contexts. Empathy-driven approaches might not get us too far, especially when we bring in beings outside of ourselves that aren’t so easily understandable rocks (the environment) or COVID-19.4
It doesn’t appear to be as simplistic as just “folding” other beings into our framework. The tools need to be mended, our thinking shifted.
Even before elucidating the tension in our theory with the proposed expansion, questioning and probing empathy has long been a pastime for researchers and designers. Medium and LinkedIn posts have questioned the percept on semantic grounds, with flashy, clickbait-y titles, or stake larger counterattacks on the foundational value in the writing and rewriting of the field. One post, for instance, outlined the impossibility of conjuring up empathy in short-term research sprints, instead offering that real empathy takes time and that designers are more closely deploying compassion.5 In a separate piece, Erika Hall links the term “empathy” to its Wikipedia page and the many ways in which the term is understood.6
This suspicion makes even greater sense, in light of another pillar guiding UX work, simplistically put as “be objective.” To “lead with empathy” stands in direct contrast to the industry principle to “be objective.” This stance is dialectically opposed, even if we take empathy to be closer to compassion. Empathy and compassion are affect-laden states (i.e., explicitly not objective). To fit both into the same framework seems to require researchers to inhabit a state similar to “mettā” or “loving-kindness”—the hollowing out of and filling the self with compassion and loving-kindness for the other.
The Researcher and Designer’s Embodied Experience
This leaves the foundational pillars rather muddled; in return, we can speak for the space we inhabit while researching and designing—how it feels to us—to try to tease out what it is we are after.
From an embodied perspective, the technique of researching and designing likely lies close to something like empathy, but it does feel too simplistic and rather unlike what we employ in our day-to-day life, due to its reliance on solutioning. It’s no longer just feeling for and feeling with but ventures beyond, when geared towards finding a solution.
The field’s adherence to the label of “objectivity” is boiled down from what it is, as well, but the trajectory makes sense—the term is pointing to but not capturing what it is. It’s not veneration and it’s not desecration of a subject. There is no malice in our intentions, and we are wary to say that subjects should not be loved or put on a pedestal. This puts us at odds with a lot of philosophers, but tentatively, we pose: love for a subject, deep veneration that borders more on worship than respect, often obscures the subject. Subjects shouldn’t be put on a pedestal nor despised, as we find that either extreme gets in the way of their true expression.
It is something of a neutral affect towards a subject, while designing from a place of not wanting to do harm.
Maybe more so, it is all couched in a desire to truly know them, understand them, and through that understanding, design for them.
Our intention is to fully understand a subject, never limit their expression, and open ourselves up to receiving as much of them as we can.
With this intention in mind, researchers and designers must account for their biases as much as possible to not obscure the subject. There are lesser-known ways in which these biases and experiences can creep up and limit the full expression of the subject.
One, “help” should not be purely based on a researcher or designer’s barometers of care, so that it becomes less about the subject and more about the researcher. (i.e. “Oh, you looked uncomfortable, so I got you this.”)
Two, researchers and designers should be privy to reactions and their subsequent deeper meanings. The issue of requiring suffering to be palatable, and difference to be wholly comprehensible. (i.e., A subject performing certain emotions, such as sadness over anger, knowing that their needs will be better met, as it is perceived as more palatable. or A researcher not acknowledging that a subject’s pain may not manifest in the ways it would for the researcher or designer, in ways that may not be expected or palatable, and still being responsive to these needs.)
Three, a desire to supplant the subject’s feelings and experiences with our own. An experience or feeling may be relatable, but the fear is that aligning too closely with the feeling could obscure the full expression of the subject. (i.e., A researcher or designer “seeing themself” in a subject’s experiences.)
It’s a dual thinking-feeling process. It’s rational in order to solution, but it’s feeling in order to understand. It’s a way of understanding on an emotional level without letting emotions obscure the true expression of a subject. At the same time, it is acknowledging that something is always lost in the making of a subject intelligible in order to design for them.
Perhaps, Erika Hall put it best, exposing the vast definitions functioning as a stand-in for “empathy” and succinctly capturing the embodied experience of researchers and designers.
The term [empathy] is problematic because it conflates a basic human emotional response (empathy) with a process that requires critical thinking (evidence-based design).
Design problems are larger than the subjective experience of individual humans. While it is absolutely necessary to understand the lived reality of people to design for them, this is not sufficient.7
The conditions through which the field was born out of lend themselves to no clear, succinct, and perhaps powerful enough definition of “empathy” or, at least, the mechanism in which researchers and designers are calling upon. Empathy is broadly defined, making it difficult to converge on some single, universal definition. Industry (UX, UI, service design) processes have standardized and made efficient collective sensemaking processes that are in reality quite complex, but with that systematization, there is a loss of complexity. The terms (“be objective” yet “lead with empathy”) are simplistic to the point of being terse, functioning more in a space of semiotics—they are stand-ins for intensive processes, perhaps only and best defined through the embodied practice of doing the researching and designing.
We’re wary of dismissing empathy entirely or making a reactionary jump back to the status quo; it is useful, or at least, something like it is useful.
We need to start from goodness, or compassion, or empathy, or ethics, or some form of responsibility to others. An empathy or compassion-laden approach stands in stark contrast to the manipulative and dark practices employed by products that seek engagement above all else. It’s a completely different point of departure.
While UX employs empathy, those who call for more than the human in our theories employ responsibility. Posthumanists and neomaterialists have recognized the shortcomings of empathy for beings that are not so easily understandable.
Understanding end users is hard enough, but when we make the extension to other beings, it becomes distinctly more difficult. A recent study out of Arizona State University found that most people have a very hard time discerning how their dogs feel, often relying too greatly on contextual clues laden with biases.
In the edited footage, the dog appeared on a black background; all environmental context had been removed. On average, participants “couldn’t tell the difference between whether the dog was happy or sad,” says Molinaro, of Arizona State University in Tempe. Only after they watched unedited footage could participants correctly rate the dog’s emotional state.8
Context is important, but with little success with our closest companions, it makes it difficult to begin to venture to other beings. Further, how can we “feel for and feel with” subjects that we may not (and may never) fully understand?
Empathy Under the Business
This is the beginning of this inquiry, as we have only set the stage for the role of the Business in all of this. Employing empathy within an environment that has always been geared towards profit maximizing [the product experience] has reeked of some form of the banality of evil or complicity; we could never fully disconnect ourselves from the landscape in which we did our work. At the same time, researchers and designers have agency, and not trying to use their position for good would be a disservice and total submission.
Empathy was always an inside job. Empathy is a tool for design, but we venture to say, it isn’t always the most effective tool for changing executives’ minds. While empathy may be useful in certain situations for swaying or moving stakeholders, it seems to do little in light of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business priorities. Depending on the environment and stakeholder, it may still be usefully deployed while presenting a design’s impact.
This inquiry instead is a call to the very heart of the researcher and designer. This most greatly impacts their work because it affects the actual processes of research and design. It falls upon all of us to continue to do the meta-work that we have always done, born out of a million different research and design processes, to better advance the public interest.
Cite this publication
APA
MIdST LABS. (2025, April 2). Empathy is All Wrong, Against Empathy: A Totally New Research Approach You Need Now. MIdST LABS. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-is-all-wrong-against-empathy
Chicago
MIdST LABS. "Empathy is All Wrong, Against Empathy: A Totally New Research Approach You Need Now." MIdST LABS, April 2, 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-is-all-wrong-against-empathy
MLA
MIdST LABS. "Empathy is All Wrong, Against Empathy: A Totally New Research Approach You Need Now." MIdST LABS, 2 April 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/empathy-is-all-wrong-against-empathy
Nguyen, C. (2025, March 16). Duolingo Renamed UX to “Product Experience”: Why This Matters for Designers. Medium. https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/duolingo-renamed-ux-to-product-experience-why-this-matters-for-designers-f3482e6df798
MIdST LABS. (2025, Feb. 12). B[e]y[ond] Human Design. MIdST LABS Substack. https://midstlabs.substack.com/beyond-human-design
Sampson, O. (2022, Feb. 3). Stop Bastardizing Design with False Empathy. UX Magazine. https://uxmag.com/articles/stop-bastardizing-design-with-false-empathy
Hall, E. (2017, Oct. 19). Everyday Empathy. Medium. https://medium.com/mule-design/everyday-empathy-6a475e03fd81
Hall, E. (2017, Oct. 19). Everyday Empathy. Medium. https://medium.com/mule-design/everyday-empathy-6a475e03fd81
Tomma, G. (2025, March 26). You might be reading your dog’s moods wrong. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/reading-dog-mood-physical-environmental
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