Using UX Empathy Mapping for Greater Cultural Sensitivity

In this Social Justice Community of Practice workshop, we'll look at the common UX design practice of empathy mapping to try and understand various cultural and learning diversities we might be working with in our classes, and how the unique and individual experiences of our learners may influence their perception or understanding of our lessons. We will ask questions about how we may think differently or adjust to better understand and support our students.

Here are the questions we'll possibly answer or try and understand through the workshop:

• How can we use empathy mapping to create more culturally responsive and inclusive learning environments?
• How can empathy mapping help instructors identify and mitigate their own biases in course design and delivery?
• How can instructors use empathy maps to inform their course design and teaching decisions?

About Mairin Deery

Mairin's work is largely in helping organizations recentre their vision and values, hone in on their mission, and bring consistency to their message. Her values-based approach involves understanding and embracing specific audiences and their motivations to turn them into engaged users. She has worked in collaboration with groups to build design accessibility education materials, have collaborated with clients in remote communities to understand and articulate their vision for their futures, and explained high-level engineering concepts in visual only to audiences of many languages. She focuses on key learnings to determine and execute what is best for each audience, adapting and innovating with communities as they grow and change.