November 16, 2015 at 11:03Compassion for another's pain
Today is the time to talk with you about such unique properties of a person as empathy, the ability to feel someone else's pain and the ability to carry it through oneself. Today it is this particularity of a person that is everywhere ousted by cynicism and snobbery, self-righteousness and callousness, and I see precisely this as the main reason for the low quality of information products created on the Russian market.
Why, when designing modern sites, is precisely the ability to feel the reality of someone else's pain is a much more important skill than the ability to lay layers or move gray squares on the screen? This is partly due to the national mentality, namely, to our centuries-old pride that all processes in our ordinary reality occur only “regardless of ...”, “in the fight against ...” and “overcoming ...” everything else.
And here, blind copying of Western patterns with their lightness and ease, with their fun and positiveness, very badly falls on our national spirituality. Arguments? Here you are - the most ordinary vacation planning or apartment renovation is easy positive entertainment only for a scanty layer of wealthy people, who are many abroad and in Moscow City, and very few in Russia. For the average Russian, buying a tour to Turkey and wallpaper to the living room by the throes of choice, by the abundance of scandals, by changing the initial decision and by finding discounts is more like a difficult and painful process of choosing the “least evil” from the possible ones.
How to use the feeling of someone else's pain in practice?
When creating a new web service, you should not think at all that a person is ready to joyfully accept the first sentence he sees that a search engine will give him. Nothing of the sort, an ordinary person is not locked up in an Internet prison at all, but has a huge number of heterogeneous sources of information, and therefore the key mistake of an inexperienced site designer will be the thought that people who are looking for the first available fence construction service come to the site they create. Not at all, here’s the real case, written from the words of a real and living person, which contains a huge amount of internal pain and conflicts that exist in his life, regardless of the use of parallax on your site:
A) There is a friend Lech who works in some sort of sharaga, where they build houses, baths, well, and put up fences at the same time. I would call him, but, knowing Lech for a long time, I understand what quality these fences will be, if everything is the same there as he is.
B) So, Petr Petrovich advises me another company. Well, yes, I know him - he always climbs with his advice, shows that he knows everything and is constantly trying to teach everyone life. To order now through the company which he has recommended is to forever make it clear to this eccentric that his advice in the future will be constantly needed, valuable and important, so then he will not be dismissed from the chair at all.
C) Another wife’s friend offers the company, there they have such a “nice little site, all so vanilla and designer.” Well, women, what can we get from them, what can these glamorous designers who bought gay phones for themselves (no, the author of the article is not homophobic, but you need to understand the audience’s value system), to understand as a professional, in welding gates and so on? Surely, next to this beautiful picture just sit the next "effective managers" who vacuum up all orders from the Internet, make a wrap of 200% and then throw off the finished orders to the left team, which they found through the local newspaper. Conclusion - do not even call.
And what comes out in the end? Here are a bunch of options, and there’s nothing to choose from: hackwork, nanny, or stereotyped inanimate phrases that competitors have accumulated from each other.
Yeah. Here’s a great site - no buckwheat for you, just a simple black table on a white background with a list of options and prices. It’s good that there’s no nonsense like “Our advantages” or forged reviews there, but there is a photo showing the quality of the gate welding, and then even the concrete concreting process is shown on the video (taken on the phone). And below the brigade’s phone is excellent, but what else does a normal peasant need in order to call on his own and solve everything by the deadlines?
Women have their own particular pain (I use this term because the “problem” is a broken nail), which smoothie does not help to comprehend. Of course, we’ll take another real case and show how understanding female pain could help all of us start making high-quality kindergarten sites. Again, the pinnacle of “professional profanity” would be to think that when looking for a children's site through a search engine, a woman had never seen, hadn’t visited herself, and didn’t know anything about kindergartens, and that any picture with a smiling child (piglet) could instantly melt her mother’s heart. To consider strangers so primitive is snobbery, which is already growing into a kind of racism. I quote:
1) So, here is a site with the standard “welcomes you ...”. You don’t need to greet me, you write an approximate menu of dishes, it is important for me to know how besides sausages with pasta my child with a problem stomach will eat. Bye by.
2) So, and let's remember about regular SARS. Is there a mention on the next site of the availability of a schedule for airing the bedrooms, as well as standards for the temperature and humidity conditions in the room? Not. Do people know about airborne standards for each age group? It seems not, but people can draw giraffes beautifully. Well done, well, let the giraffes call them ...
3) Another site where some inarticulate aunts are standing among the flock of kids in the photo. What kind of aunts are they, what kind of education do they have, diplomas, certificates, is it possible to see their profiles on social networks? Well, then, have libertarian values been accepted in my family, and how can I protect a child from frantic quilted slogans that he will be forced to listen to for 8 hours a day?
4) Here is a kindergarten, about which friends have long complained that there are monthly fees for curtains. We look at the photos and see the cheapest curtains on the windows. Conclusion - the next gathering of thieves and scammers under the guise of a child care facility. To give away your child like that? Never.
Did your keywords work here, gentlemen? Did the logo with glasses and antennae shoot, gentlemen, illustrators? Until all maternal pain passes through your own heart - and never fire. They solve the true troubles of people that are impossible to understand, simply by looking at the most popular queries on Wordstat or by studying the latest animation fashion in Dribble. It was not sad to admit it, but the volatile fashion for graphic techniques does not affect the healing of the user's internal pain, which appeared in him long before the start of visiting sites and turning on the PC in general.
The entire customer journey map that you designed, in which the user starts using a PC or a mobile gadget to solve his problem earlier than steps 5-6, has nothing to do with reality and is not able to understand and feel someone else’s pain, because they give away with formalism and soullessness, like on an example below:
By the way, that is why in the first few months from the moment the services were shot so, promising a manager’s callback within 30 seconds or less. These modal windows responded to the real alien pain of an ordinary ordinary person: “Well, now I will leave them my phone and what? And when they call, who will call, will they call at all or the office closed 2 years ago, and forgot to delete the site? ”For many people, the guarantee of receiving feedback from a certain set of pages and pictures, in the first six months after the appearance, was akin to the discovery of America, not smaller.
So, the problem of empathy, the presence of an open vulnerable heart for an interface designer is important, of course, not only when choosing a team or kindergarten. So, a person who has spent all his life on stable salaries will never understand the full strength of the internal pain of an ordinary businessman, who keeps in his head the simple thought that every decision, any unjustified waste, can cause a fatal blow to the cause of his whole life and welfare his family. The designer on stable earnings - stably will not hear the entire depth of the problems alien and alien to him personally.
Travel Russia
Or here's another fun example - the boom in the development of domestic tourism in Russia. This is when a person who flew in from Frankfurt via Los Angeles yesterday suddenly found out that somewhere in Russia there is some kind of cool place Arkaim and that tourists can also be transported there. The collection of money from investors has already begun, and the order of a unique design, and beautiful presentations - after all, such an idea from the Moscow office looks very promising. This is a great visual example of complete isolation from reality, when in the heads of snobs of this kind who do not feel real human pain, pictures are already being drawn with hotels for foreign tourists, social profiles of all friends and acquaintances, clogged selfies from Arkaim ...
In fact, friends, Arkaim is not Nice at all, but the travel time from the nearest airport or from the railway junction to the place of the tourist center is about 6 hours by car, and one way. Imagine a foreigner with a family who wants to ride an UAZ through the mud for the very 6 hours to inspect such a field in the wilderness where there is no 4G for active use of Instagram?
From the same opera and ideas, ridiculous in their naivety, to carry tourists to the first hall, in which the famous world boxing champion Konstantin Tszyu was engaged. In the presentation, it looks very tasty and cost-effective, but 8 hours in an electric train to inspect this building - is this not called a complete loss of connection with reality?
So it turns out that you need to develop internal travel not from the web at all, from the construction of new airports (by the way, who knows: how many over the past 5 years they have appeared in new cities?) Or high-speed highways. So the society on its own, without too much stimulation with banners, will have a demand for everything in new mobile applications for choosing quick and comfortable trips inside your favorite country.
About the most tragic
I have one acquaintance, a wonderful specialist, an excellent expert in promotion, but also an ideal example of a person who does not feel someone else’s pain at all, who completely does not let the real world perception of strangers into his cold heart. So, in his project to promote a funeral agency, he tries to use all the same trivial methods: create more identical pages, cram more keywords and auto-texts in them, drag more people from search engines to the site by hook or by crook. Kostya was lucky - he himself never experienced real pain from the loss of the one whom he would truly love, and therefore all this reality is simply unable to meet his head:
A noise in the head. A feeling of complete unreality of what is happening, weakness in the hands, communication with phrases breaking off at a glance, a two-hour silent attempt to see in the light of the window an answer to the simple question: “how and why to live on?”
And in this state, according to Kostya (and many similar cynical hipsters), the very first thing that any person supposedly needs to do is go to Google and drive into the search for something like “turnkey elite funerals” or “velvet brushes for the coffin - according to the action, catch it right now.”
I emphasize once again that people in your usability scenarios who are absolutely heartbroken do not ask life for “God, why”, not “it would be better if I left, but he stayed”, and not even “I don’t know what to do now,” and only the advertising-soulless "discounts on the funeral service, left 23 hours 59 minutes."
We are hardened, we are mired in complacency, we have ceased to understand all those for whose sake and for whose benefit we were obliged to work. We no longer capture the vibrations of tearing the people around us into pieces of real flour. That is why our sites look cardboard, and mobile applications - not live.
Let’s think for a moment, but how could a funeral agency really get closer to ordinary people without all this treasury and formalism? It's simple: to respond in a timely manner to existing tragic informational events, for example, to collect signatures, clothes, toys for victims in other regions on absolutely free terms. Or even start a Live Support Magazine through which every Internet user could randomly support completely unfamiliar people by writing a few kind words to those who have now really lost their meaning of life and faith in happiness (with full pre-moderation).
And then, when in the whole city every person will have a single reflex “When everyone and everyone is bad - it’s this agency with employees who are not indifferent to our pain” that will help you, and then this memory built into the subconscious mind will work when a personal tragedy occurs , but not a stretch over the road. We’ll be closer to people, without Google, without keywords, without a site in general, but with the emotion of joint overcoming real pain.
Khanin raised his eyes.
“You have learned a lot of words, praise,” he said. “But how do you not understand that they don’t offer such things?” After all, they poured all the blood of the heart into this Tampako. It’s like for them ... In short, people have complete self-identification with their product, and you tell them such things. It’s like telling your mother: your son, of course, is a freak, but we will bring him a little paint in the face, and it will be fine.
“But the name is really creepy.”
“What do you want them to be happy, or you?”
IN. Pelevin Generation P
Why, when designing modern sites, is precisely the ability to feel the reality of someone else's pain is a much more important skill than the ability to lay layers or move gray squares on the screen? This is partly due to the national mentality, namely, to our centuries-old pride that all processes in our ordinary reality occur only “regardless of ...”, “in the fight against ...” and “overcoming ...” everything else.
And here, blind copying of Western patterns with their lightness and ease, with their fun and positiveness, very badly falls on our national spirituality. Arguments? Here you are - the most ordinary vacation planning or apartment renovation is easy positive entertainment only for a scanty layer of wealthy people, who are many abroad and in Moscow City, and very few in Russia. For the average Russian, buying a tour to Turkey and wallpaper to the living room by the throes of choice, by the abundance of scandals, by changing the initial decision and by finding discounts is more like a difficult and painful process of choosing the “least evil” from the possible ones.
How to use the feeling of someone else's pain in practice?
When creating a new web service, you should not think at all that a person is ready to joyfully accept the first sentence he sees that a search engine will give him. Nothing of the sort, an ordinary person is not locked up in an Internet prison at all, but has a huge number of heterogeneous sources of information, and therefore the key mistake of an inexperienced site designer will be the thought that people who are looking for the first available fence construction service come to the site they create. Not at all, here’s the real case, written from the words of a real and living person, which contains a huge amount of internal pain and conflicts that exist in his life, regardless of the use of parallax on your site:
A) There is a friend Lech who works in some sort of sharaga, where they build houses, baths, well, and put up fences at the same time. I would call him, but, knowing Lech for a long time, I understand what quality these fences will be, if everything is the same there as he is.
B) So, Petr Petrovich advises me another company. Well, yes, I know him - he always climbs with his advice, shows that he knows everything and is constantly trying to teach everyone life. To order now through the company which he has recommended is to forever make it clear to this eccentric that his advice in the future will be constantly needed, valuable and important, so then he will not be dismissed from the chair at all.
C) Another wife’s friend offers the company, there they have such a “nice little site, all so vanilla and designer.” Well, women, what can we get from them, what can these glamorous designers who bought gay phones for themselves (no, the author of the article is not homophobic, but you need to understand the audience’s value system), to understand as a professional, in welding gates and so on? Surely, next to this beautiful picture just sit the next "effective managers" who vacuum up all orders from the Internet, make a wrap of 200% and then throw off the finished orders to the left team, which they found through the local newspaper. Conclusion - do not even call.
And what comes out in the end? Here are a bunch of options, and there’s nothing to choose from: hackwork, nanny, or stereotyped inanimate phrases that competitors have accumulated from each other.
Yeah. Here’s a great site - no buckwheat for you, just a simple black table on a white background with a list of options and prices. It’s good that there’s no nonsense like “Our advantages” or forged reviews there, but there is a photo showing the quality of the gate welding, and then even the concrete concreting process is shown on the video (taken on the phone). And below the brigade’s phone is excellent, but what else does a normal peasant need in order to call on his own and solve everything by the deadlines?
Women have their own particular pain (I use this term because the “problem” is a broken nail), which smoothie does not help to comprehend. Of course, we’ll take another real case and show how understanding female pain could help all of us start making high-quality kindergarten sites. Again, the pinnacle of “professional profanity” would be to think that when looking for a children's site through a search engine, a woman had never seen, hadn’t visited herself, and didn’t know anything about kindergartens, and that any picture with a smiling child (piglet) could instantly melt her mother’s heart. To consider strangers so primitive is snobbery, which is already growing into a kind of racism. I quote:
1) So, here is a site with the standard “welcomes you ...”. You don’t need to greet me, you write an approximate menu of dishes, it is important for me to know how besides sausages with pasta my child with a problem stomach will eat. Bye by.
2) So, and let's remember about regular SARS. Is there a mention on the next site of the availability of a schedule for airing the bedrooms, as well as standards for the temperature and humidity conditions in the room? Not. Do people know about airborne standards for each age group? It seems not, but people can draw giraffes beautifully. Well done, well, let the giraffes call them ...
3) Another site where some inarticulate aunts are standing among the flock of kids in the photo. What kind of aunts are they, what kind of education do they have, diplomas, certificates, is it possible to see their profiles on social networks? Well, then, have libertarian values been accepted in my family, and how can I protect a child from frantic quilted slogans that he will be forced to listen to for 8 hours a day?
4) Here is a kindergarten, about which friends have long complained that there are monthly fees for curtains. We look at the photos and see the cheapest curtains on the windows. Conclusion - the next gathering of thieves and scammers under the guise of a child care facility. To give away your child like that? Never.
Did your keywords work here, gentlemen? Did the logo with glasses and antennae shoot, gentlemen, illustrators? Until all maternal pain passes through your own heart - and never fire. They solve the true troubles of people that are impossible to understand, simply by looking at the most popular queries on Wordstat or by studying the latest animation fashion in Dribble. It was not sad to admit it, but the volatile fashion for graphic techniques does not affect the healing of the user's internal pain, which appeared in him long before the start of visiting sites and turning on the PC in general.
The entire customer journey map that you designed, in which the user starts using a PC or a mobile gadget to solve his problem earlier than steps 5-6, has nothing to do with reality and is not able to understand and feel someone else’s pain, because they give away with formalism and soullessness, like on an example below:
By the way, that is why in the first few months from the moment the services were shot so, promising a manager’s callback within 30 seconds or less. These modal windows responded to the real alien pain of an ordinary ordinary person: “Well, now I will leave them my phone and what? And when they call, who will call, will they call at all or the office closed 2 years ago, and forgot to delete the site? ”For many people, the guarantee of receiving feedback from a certain set of pages and pictures, in the first six months after the appearance, was akin to the discovery of America, not smaller.
So, the problem of empathy, the presence of an open vulnerable heart for an interface designer is important, of course, not only when choosing a team or kindergarten. So, a person who has spent all his life on stable salaries will never understand the full strength of the internal pain of an ordinary businessman, who keeps in his head the simple thought that every decision, any unjustified waste, can cause a fatal blow to the cause of his whole life and welfare his family. The designer on stable earnings - stably will not hear the entire depth of the problems alien and alien to him personally.
Travel Russia
Or here's another fun example - the boom in the development of domestic tourism in Russia. This is when a person who flew in from Frankfurt via Los Angeles yesterday suddenly found out that somewhere in Russia there is some kind of cool place Arkaim and that tourists can also be transported there. The collection of money from investors has already begun, and the order of a unique design, and beautiful presentations - after all, such an idea from the Moscow office looks very promising. This is a great visual example of complete isolation from reality, when in the heads of snobs of this kind who do not feel real human pain, pictures are already being drawn with hotels for foreign tourists, social profiles of all friends and acquaintances, clogged selfies from Arkaim ...
In fact, friends, Arkaim is not Nice at all, but the travel time from the nearest airport or from the railway junction to the place of the tourist center is about 6 hours by car, and one way. Imagine a foreigner with a family who wants to ride an UAZ through the mud for the very 6 hours to inspect such a field in the wilderness where there is no 4G for active use of Instagram?
From the same opera and ideas, ridiculous in their naivety, to carry tourists to the first hall, in which the famous world boxing champion Konstantin Tszyu was engaged. In the presentation, it looks very tasty and cost-effective, but 8 hours in an electric train to inspect this building - is this not called a complete loss of connection with reality?
So it turns out that you need to develop internal travel not from the web at all, from the construction of new airports (by the way, who knows: how many over the past 5 years they have appeared in new cities?) Or high-speed highways. So the society on its own, without too much stimulation with banners, will have a demand for everything in new mobile applications for choosing quick and comfortable trips inside your favorite country.
About the most tragic
I have one acquaintance, a wonderful specialist, an excellent expert in promotion, but also an ideal example of a person who does not feel someone else’s pain at all, who completely does not let the real world perception of strangers into his cold heart. So, in his project to promote a funeral agency, he tries to use all the same trivial methods: create more identical pages, cram more keywords and auto-texts in them, drag more people from search engines to the site by hook or by crook. Kostya was lucky - he himself never experienced real pain from the loss of the one whom he would truly love, and therefore all this reality is simply unable to meet his head:
A noise in the head. A feeling of complete unreality of what is happening, weakness in the hands, communication with phrases breaking off at a glance, a two-hour silent attempt to see in the light of the window an answer to the simple question: “how and why to live on?”
And in this state, according to Kostya (and many similar cynical hipsters), the very first thing that any person supposedly needs to do is go to Google and drive into the search for something like “turnkey elite funerals” or “velvet brushes for the coffin - according to the action, catch it right now.”
I emphasize once again that people in your usability scenarios who are absolutely heartbroken do not ask life for “God, why”, not “it would be better if I left, but he stayed”, and not even “I don’t know what to do now,” and only the advertising-soulless "discounts on the funeral service, left 23 hours 59 minutes."
We are hardened, we are mired in complacency, we have ceased to understand all those for whose sake and for whose benefit we were obliged to work. We no longer capture the vibrations of tearing the people around us into pieces of real flour. That is why our sites look cardboard, and mobile applications - not live.
Let’s think for a moment, but how could a funeral agency really get closer to ordinary people without all this treasury and formalism? It's simple: to respond in a timely manner to existing tragic informational events, for example, to collect signatures, clothes, toys for victims in other regions on absolutely free terms. Or even start a Live Support Magazine through which every Internet user could randomly support completely unfamiliar people by writing a few kind words to those who have now really lost their meaning of life and faith in happiness (with full pre-moderation).
And then, when in the whole city every person will have a single reflex “When everyone and everyone is bad - it’s this agency with employees who are not indifferent to our pain” that will help you, and then this memory built into the subconscious mind will work when a personal tragedy occurs , but not a stretch over the road. We’ll be closer to people, without Google, without keywords, without a site in general, but with the emotion of joint overcoming real pain.
“You do not believe in what you are doing.” Do not participate in the soul.
“I am not participating,” said Tatar. - Still would. What do you want? That I "Tampako" let into my soul? Yes, not a single *** from Pushkinskaya Square will do that.
“You just need to get into a pose,” Khanin grimaced.
“No,” said Tatar, calming down, “you misunderstood me.” Now everyone has the same pose, you just have to position yourself correctly, right?
- Right.
- So why am I saying that not a single *** will do? The point here is not disgust. Just bl *** in all cases receives money - the client liked it or not, but I have to first ... Well, you understand. And only then the client will decide ... And under such conditions absolutely surely no bl *** will work.
“Bl ***, maybe he won’t,” Khanin interrupted. - And we, if we want to survive in this business, will become. And not yet do it.
IN. Pelevin Generation P