The Importance of Empathy for Analyzing Privacy Requirements

Empathy is the first step of the design thinking (DT) paradigm, which has recently gained interest among software development organizations, leveraging the design and innovation processes for better meeting the required end-user experience. The DT paradigm places the customer needs up-front and emphasizes facilitating empathy with users, observing their behavior, and drawing conclusions about what people want and need. In this paper we analyze, through the lens of DT, findings of former research studies which indicated that by and large, software developers are not minded to privacy requirements. Our analysis demonstrates that the absence of empathy leads to neglecting important privacy concerns when designing software systems. Following this analysis, we posit that the empathy step, as manifested in the DT paradigm, is a necessary component of requirements engineering for unveiling and addressing the type of requirements that are at high risk of being overlooked. Employing empathy techniques and tools provided by the DT paradigm can foster empathy practices and skills of software engineers, who often do not practice empathy in their professional work.