Lauren Chapman Ruiz shares an interesting viewpoint about the role of empathy in design in Inside the Empathy Trap. The issue is that we can’t just have empathy with one person, we need to have an understanding of a wide variety of goals and needs:

When we design, we pursue a broader type of empathy. As a colleague once said to me, designers need to identify with the whole user base. User-centricity is about the ability to recognize that there are a number of personas, each with different goals, desires, challenges, behaviors, and needs. We design for these personas, recognizing that each has different goals they’re trying to accomplish and with different behaviors in how they go about achieving them.

This is another good argument for why personas aren’t dead — they help us to keep our entire target audience in mind without getting overwhelmed.