I Didn't Study UX. I Just Hated Being Annoyed

Every fix I made came from noticing frustration, mine or someone else's.

UX is empathy. That is the core.

Research and systems help you understand what users need. Empathy is what makes you care enough to build it properly. The rest is just fancy words for "don't make people want to throw their laptop out the window."

Why empathy is the foundation

Once you care about preventing pain for others, you start seeing every person who opens your product as someone with a goal, a mood, and a limit.

Someone using your app at midnight might be tired. Someone stuck on slow internet might already feel frustrated. A parent juggling a toddler might not have time to explore anything.

Empathy keeps you honest. It reminds you you are building for real people, not the tidy personas you write down.

What empathy actually means in UX

Empathy is understanding how something hits a person in the moment. Their energy, confidence, focus, or frustration. People have limits, and bad design burns through those limits fast.

Good UX exists because someone understood the cost of friction and chose not to waste the user's effort.

How I learned it

When I started building things, I didn't think in terms of journeys. I watched how people moved. I used myself as the first test user. If something felt awkward to me, it would feel worse to someone who didn't build it.

People noticed before I did. I got invited to user testing sessions for apps I didn't work on. Games, productivity tools used globally, systems used in serious environments where friction could cost more than time. I thought I was there as the fresh pair of eyes, but really I was spotting friction before anyone said anything. I could feel when something was off.

I wasn't being fussy. I just cared whether something sucked to use or not. Back then I didn't know that was UX. Obviously, UX has evolved but it's still just empathy doing the work. Turns out "being annoyed on behalf of other people" is actually a marketable skill. Who knew?

If someone hesitated, I changed the order.
If they smiled, I kept that moment.
If they closed the tab, I figured out why.
If they couldn't find something in seconds, it needed another look.

I was testing human behaviour without calling it that. Every adjustment came from noticing where someone's energy dropped and fixing it before they had to explain it.

UX in engineering

UX is designing / engineering with empathy baked in. Structure that feels considerate.

A decent loading message is empathy. Clear validation is empathy. Errors that explain what happened instead of blaming the user are empathy.

You can feel it in the timing, the flow, and the language. You can tell when a developer cared. And you can definitely tell when they didn't. "Error 500: Something went wrong" is just the developer shrugging at you through the screen.

The history that proved the point

UX didn’t start with screens. It started with people trying to make tools feel natural.

1940s, human factors in aviation: Engineers studied how pilots interacted with cockpit controls. A confusing layout could cost lives. They were reducing cognitive stress under pressure. That was empathy.

1950s, industrial design and ergonomics: Everyday tools were shaped to fit the hand, not just the machine. If a handle caused hesitation, it was redesigned. Physical discomfort was treated as a design bug.

1980s, personal computing goes mainstream: Software reached everyday people. Apple needed more than functional interfaces. Don Norman coined user experience because he needed a term wide enough to cover how a product made someone feel across the entire journey.

The terms changed. The motive stayed the same. Understand the person before building for them. Empathy has always been the engine.

The kinds of empathy UX demands

Empathy in UX shows up in different layers:

Cognitive empathy
Understanding how someone might think or misinterpret something. Reordering screens because users hesitated is predicting confusion before it becomes frustration.

Emotional empathy
Recognising how someone might feel. When I designed reward charts that felt encouraging instead of forced, that was designing for motivation, not just function.

Behavioural empathy
Adjusting flows based on how people actually move, not how we assume they will. Noticing where energy dropped helped me remove friction.

Self empathy and future empathy
Admitting the cost of repetitive or clunky workflows. Building systems and automations that protect future users and your future self from burnout.

Social empathy
Working with different minds. Building solutions that make sense to the whole team, not just one person. Good UX scales beyond the interface.

UX is understanding how thinking, emotion, behaviour, energy, and collaboration shape the experience.

What empathy looks like in practice

Small awareness, not grand gestures.

Introduce a new layout but let users switch back for a while. Make space for them to adjust.

If you catch yourself thinking that someone will probably miss a button, move it.

Write copy that explains instead of blames.

Design error handling for problems people will never report. Silence still counts as feedback.

Why it matters

Empathy improves outcomes. Products that feel human convert faster, retain longer, and earn trust sooner.

Every product reflects something. Without empathy, it reflects the builder. With empathy, it reflects the user.