Building Empathy: Scaling User Research for Organizational Impact

Building user empathy in a tech organization is crucial to ensure that products are designed with an eye toward user needs and experiences. The Pokerface program is a Google internal user empathy campaign with 26 researchers that helped more than 1500 employees—including engineers, product managers, designers, analysts, and program managers across more than 15 sites—have first-hand experiences with their users. Here, we discuss the goals of the Pokerface program, some challenges that we have faced during execution, and the impact we have measured thus far.