Closing The Empathy Gap With Mobile Businesses

When you’re designing for mobile – for the nooks and crannies of someone’s life – you need to have a deep understanding of who you’re creating for. For most products, that knowledge will help close the empathy gap between your team and your users. But for service marketplaces (Thumbtack, Airbnb, Lyft), that knowledge will also help you close the empathy gap that exists between your individual user groups (pros & customers, hosts & guests, drivers & riders). As design lead at Thumbtack, a marketplace that connects customers with local professionals, Audrey Liu and her team spend a lot of time thinking about how to minimize these gaps in a startup environment. She’ll talk about common obstacles, how to overcome them, and best practices for designing more meaningful user-to-user connections through empathy.