Empathy in Engineering

A curated list of resources for building and promoting more compassionate engineering cultures

Contents

• Words
  • Empathy for your users
  • Empathy for your peers
  • Empathy in hiring
• JavaScript
  • Simulations
  • Bookmarklets

Words

Articles (📰), books (📚) and videos (📹) on how to build a more empathic culture at work and the benefits.

Empathy for your users

• Too sensitive: About microaggressions in UX 📰 - Sara Ann Marie on Medium discusses how small breaks in UX alienate users.
• The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User 📰 - Betsy Haibel in Model View Culture discusses how UX “greypatterns” and “darkpatterns” are prevalent in the web.
• Empathy: The key to a successful software project 📰 - Gregory Brown at O'Reilly discusses how to identify the most important stakeholders and ask questions to build the best product for them.
• On Facebook's "Compassion Team" 📰 - The New York Times looks at Facebook's "Compassion Team" tasked with making Facebook more humane.
• Designing for Disaster 📹 - Eric Meyer at An Event Apart tells us the most difficult day of his life and how important it is to design for people who may be having the worst days of their lives too.
• Design for Real Life 📚 - This book by Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlights design techniques that identify stress cases and design with compassion.

Empathy for your peers

• We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation: Here’s why 📰 - At Etsy's Code as Craft blog, they discuss why they make their designers and product managers do an engineering rotation.
• On Empathy & Pull Requests at Slack 📰 | Followup 📰 - The Slack Engineering blog goes into how good pull requests are an act of empathy of our teammates.
• Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture 📰 - Etsy's Code as Craft blog discusses how they look at mistakes with a perspective of learning through blameless post-mortems.
• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team 📰 - The New York Times synthesizes how Google's data-driven culture discovered that norms centering communication and empathy made better teams.
• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most 📚 - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project write about how to handle difficult conversations through a series of techniques that consider the "Third Story."
• Engineering Empathy: Fostering an Inclusive Culture at our Code School 📹 - Lateesha Thomas discusses why empathy is part of the curriculum at DevBootcamp at Alterconf SF 2016.
• Empathy Explainer 📹 - A quick animation of Brené Brown talk on what empathy is and how it differs from sympathy.

Empathy in Hiring

• A Guide to Empathetic Hiring Process 📰 - @Fox on Medium discuss a few simple things employers can do to be kind to job applicants.

JavaScript

Sometimes you need code samples to implement strategies above.

Simulations

• JS Simulation of Dyslexia - This is a simulation of what it is like to read a block of text with dyslexia.

Bookmarklets

• JS Bookmarklet Simulating Colorblindness - This is a JS bookmarklet that takes any page and simulates what is like to navigate with colorblindness.
• NoCoffee: JS Bookmarklet Simulating Low Vision Scenarios - This is a JS bookmarklet that takes any page and simulates in low vision scenarios.