Looking for empathy? Why don't you simmer down first.

There comes a moment, quiet, unannounced, when you realize the work has reshaped you. I did not set out to be a user experience designer. I arrived through the back door, as many of us do. But what I found there, what I learned there, was not simply how to shape interfaces, but how to hold space for people, how to listen. 2011 was the year the journey began, but the real story is in what followed. 

I was freelancing at an agency in Providence, still figuring myself out. I was working in strategy (marketing) but my background was in graphic design. And they knew that. They needed an information architect and handed me the job like it was nothing. A pile of papers landed on my desk, full of phrases like “user needs” and “scope” and “creative brief” and I remember thinking, They’ve got the wrong person. 

But I pushed through and delivered something solid. The site went on to win an award, though mostly for the design, which had very little to do with me. I still couldn’t quite explain what an information architect was, exactly. But I knew I was into it. As a graphic designer, I’d always been the kind to obsess over how something would land with the person on the other side. I used to wonder if there was a proper discipline for that kind of thinking and by chance, I had just stumbled into it.

Somehow, and I still can’t quite believe it myself, I stayed at that agency for twelve years. It is no small thing, to remain somewhere for that long. Especially when everyday felt like a con about to be exposed. As I prepared to leave, I looked back, not out of nostalgia, but necessity. I needed to understand who I had become. The difference between the designer who entered and the one who now stood ready to go was undeniable. UX design had shaped me, not only in craft but in character. It taught me, above all things, how to feel for someone at a much deeper level. And in that lesson, I found something deeper than design. I found how to be a better human being. I found empathy.

Empathy is not easily understood, nor is it easily taught. I know this because I struggled with it myself. We like to believe it is a matter of kindness, of manners. But it is not. It is far more exacting. Empathy demands that we feel what we would rather not. That we recognize our wounds in someone else's body. It is not learned from books or lectures, but from living, from suffering, from the quiet knowledge that someone else has walked through the fire you barely survived. That is where true empathy resides. In our shared fragility. In our shared strength.

But for user experience designers, this is where the trouble lies. Our job, more than anything else, is to find empathy for our users. We are user advocates. But how do we find empathy when we haven’t lived our users’ experiences?

A lot of my agency clients worked in healthcare, which, looking back, was a kind of quiet privilege. I wasn’t designing for users in the abstract. I was designing for people in the middle of something; grief, uncertainty, recovery, longing. These were not just wireframes or flows. They were really heavy moments. And trying to connect with people living those moments, trying to feel something close to what they might be feeling, that was the work that changed me.  

There was one stretch, nearly a full year, where every single project had me designing for patients and/or their caregivers. It started with an assistive site for end-of-life care, then flipped, almost jarringly, to a fertility app. And then finally, a product site for those living with chronic illness. Different needs. Different stakes. But the same emotional weight.

And the truth is, I didn’t relate to any of it. Not in any firsthand way. Sympathy? Sure. But empathy? That was harder. How does one claim to understand what they have not lived?

I am, by nature, a tactile learner. I keep my notes in hand, paper covered in ink and thoughts. And on this particular day, I found myself studying responses from a client’s emotional mapping exercise. It asked: What do we want them to know? What do we want them to do? What do we want them to feel? And buried within those answers was something quiet but undeniable. Between the words, I began to hear them. The voices and emotions I needed to tap into. And in that moment, almost without thinking, I wrote three words in the margin: simmer it down.

For caregivers navigating end-of-life care, I kept hearing the same refrains. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I'm the only one here, no one is helping!” “I’m scared I’ll mess it all up.” When I "simmered" the language down, what I was left with was something raw. Beneath their words was a landscape of fear, fatigue, and isolation. I had not walked their path, had not held that weight in the same way. But I knew what it meant to feel overwhelmed. I knew what it meant to be lost. To feel abandoned. And it was in those places of emotional recognition that empathy became possible. From there, the work shifted. The solutions came clearer. The right choices surfaced more easily. Often, those solutions reached further than what the client had originally imagined.

I created a “simmer it down” exercise, a guide if you will, to follow. Eventually, I didn’t need it anymore. It just became instinct. These days, with so much noise and distance between people, it’s all too easy to tune out the suffering of others. Which is why this practice, this act of distilling experience down to its human core, remains essential. I use it even now, watching the news, trying to take in the chaos and reduce it to something I can hold. Something contextual. Something that makes me feel closer to people I may never meet but want to understand on a deeper level. And in the evolution of who I am and who I want to be, it has made all the difference.