Designed for Empathy: One Day to Align, Energise, and Inspire Teams
In fast-moving, remote-first product teams, empathy can erode – both with users and between colleagues. intO’s Empathy Days offer a one-day immersion that reconnects teams with real people and shared purpose. Blending fieldwork with reflection, these sessions create long-lasting clarity, alignment and motivation. In this article, Research Director, Laetitia Sfez, explains why they’re as energising as they are insightful.
Working in global UX research, I’ve seen one challenge surface again and again. Remote teams are collaborating more than ever across time zones, cultures and functions, yet they often lack a shared reference point for who they’re designing for.
It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that their distance from users, and from one another, can make it difficult to align around a common understanding.
That’s why we designed Empathy Days. These one-day immersions are part research study, part off-site, and part creative workshop. They are real-world experiences that bring cross-functional teams face to face with the people they’re designing for – reconnecting them with user needs, team purpose and each other.
Unlike the user insight gleaned from Cultural Immersions (I explain how the two methodologies differ in this previous article), in just one day, Empathy Days can spark emotional understanding, refresh design assumptions and shift the way teams make decisions. They also generate unexpected benefits: accelerating decisions, building internal culture, and creating a shared language around users that lasts long after the day is done.
The experience often lays the groundwork for future research and product decisions, simply because it humanises everything that follows.
Designed for empathy with users – and teams – in mind
Empathy Days are, first and foremost, about building meaningful empathy with users. But they’re also designed with our empathy for your team.
We know that teams working remotely or across disciplines often interpret user needs differently. Assumptions can go unchallenged. Ideas can be misunderstood. But when a researcher, an engineer and a product manager share the same live encounter with a user, everything changes.
One participant described it like this:
“It was exciting, like the best kind of school trip. It was fun, and we bonded as a team. But more than that, was the conversations that we sparked across out team. It was such a productive session.”
Why now?
The pressure to move quickly has never been greater. But speed shouldn’t mean teams lose touch with the people they serve. Empathy Days are designed to respond to today’s practical constraints – time, budget, and attention – while providing experiences that shape long-term thinking.
They also answer some very real challenges that teams face:
Difficulty aligning around user needs when working remotely or cross-functionally
Siloed conversations that limit creativity and empathy
Limited direct exposure to real users for many team members
A growing appetite for off-sites that are purposeful, not just performative
Beyond alignment: what else happens?
While team alignment is at the heart of every Empathy Day, these sessions consistently deliver value in other areas too:
Faster decision-making: Teams gain clarity through shared understanding.
Fewer false starts: Early misalignments are corrected before they grow.
Greater cultural sensitivity: Seeing real lives in context influences design perspectives.
Fresh momentum: Teams leave re-energised and more motivated to solve the right problems.
As one team member said:
“I’ve been stuck on this one feature for weeks. Now I have a better feel for the issue it’s addressing, I think I can move forward with more confidence.”
A typical Empathy Day
Empathy Days are carefully curated experiences that go beyond observation. They’re designed to foster genuine interaction, emotional connection and peer-to-peer discussion, all underpinned by research rigour and operational precision.
Whether health-focused fitness classes or creative workshops with influencers, every activity is selected to bring user behaviours vividly to life. Participants walk away with shared memories, not just meeting notes.
No two Empathy Days are the same, but each is thoughtfully planned to maximise relevance, impact and connection. A day might include:
Kick-off session: We set goals, introduce participants and share essential context.
Immersive fieldwork: From in-home interviews to shared community activities and street intercepts.
Team reflection points: We encourage live note-taking, synthesis moments and shared interpretation.
Wrap-up and takeaways: Teams leave with takeaways they can act on immediately, and lasting impressions they won’t forget.
What makes Empathy Days work?
At intO, we design and deliver these experiences with care, taking full-spectrum responsibility for seamless recruitment, logistics, facilitation and planning, so your team can focus on human connection and the moments that matter.
Every detail is curated to create:
Premium but authentic experiences
Respectful and engaging participant interactions
Genuine user context
Opportunities for team insight and bonding
Our goal is to spark conversations that don’t just stay in the room but move the work forward.
Is an Empathy Day right for your team?
Empathy Days are ideal when:
Designers and engineers don’t interact directly with users
New user segments are being introduced
Internal alignment needs a boost
Remote teams want to reconnect around a shared purpose
They work best when clients are ready to engage internal stakeholders early, build excitement, and prioritise full participation.
Why intO?
With local researchers in over 60 countries and a decade of experience delivering international immersions, intO has the reach, rigour and cultural sensitivity to make every Empathy Day meaningful.
We help teams from Google, Amazon, Wise and more to reconnect with their users, refine their thinking, and create better products through better understanding.
We deliver:
Contextual depth and facilitation that supports every team member
Experiences that are strategically tailored, not off-the-shelf
Global expertise and seamless delivery
Let’s design your next Empathy Day or Immersion
Whether you’re exploring a new audience, kicking off a product sprint or simply want to build a stronger internal culture, we’d love to co-create the right Empathy Day for you. Book a time to chat with Chloe and I; no sales pitch, just a conversation about what your team needs.
In today’s fast-moving, globally distributed work environments, short-form research experiences like Empathy Days and Cultural Immersions are proving invaluable. As Research Director, Laetitia Sfez, explains, these formats reconnect teams with real users, either through energising, collaborative sessions or deep, contextual exploration in local markets. Though brief, both deliver enduring impact by challenging assumptions, aligning teams, and anchoring innovation in authentic human insight. This article helps you choose the right format, and shows how intO delivers each with strategic care and cultural sensitivity.
In today’s fragmented global landscape, assumptions made at headquarters no longer hold. In this article, Joanna Brassett, Founder and CEO of Studio intO, explores how default thinking derails innovation, and how intO’s Local Lens Approach embeds real local context into strategy and design. From fintech to AI, global teams use our insight model to create products that are not just adapted, but truly relevant. When you stop assuming, you start designing better.
