Why our products and communities need our empathy

Empathy is a fundamental to our work, but also error-prone. However, communities are an opportunity to learn more about each other. We’ll cover how it can be hard to understand each other, how to improve upon this, and use this make our products and communities happy, inviting and supportive places.

Empathy is a fundamental part of human interaction. When we communicate by email or at conferences, or indirectly, when we create products, events, or do a talk. However, our understanding of other people is full of error, and worse, bias. This can lead us to make communities and products that work poorly for people that are different from ourselves, introduce confusion and misunderstanding, exclude people unintentionally, and sometimes even cause harm.

However, our communities are an opportunity to learn as well. To embrace our diversity, and expand our understanding of other people’s worlds. To gain understanding of other people’s situations, experiences and emotions, which can be dramatically different to ours. And how we can use this to create both products and communities which work great not only for ourselves, but also those that we more easily forget about. As creators in tech we have such tremendous power to create change, but merely our best intentions will not be enough for that.

This talk will explore how and why we sometimes have such difficulty to understand others, and how others can have difficulty to understand us. We’ll talk about why other people’s experiences, emotion and perceptions can be so different. Both for the world as a whole, but also with the speaker’s personal experiences. Finally, we’ll cover specific ways for us to understand others better, and associated pitfalls, to make our communities and products happy, inviting and supportive places.

This talk absolutely needs a 45 minute slot.

Recent recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biwApccM1Sg

Previous attendees of this talk said:

• “I think this touched the very core of the complexity of empathy and vulnerability”
• “I feel safe in this community, and talks like this are one of the main reasons.”
• “Having a talk about such a difficult topic makes you a great role model in general to me!”
• “Your talk made me feel so much more welcome and safe at this event.”
• “As usual, she’s delivering an amazing talk.”
• “Great speech, really important and meaningful.”
• “Awesome, awesome talk.”