Design Toolkit
Designing with Empathy in the Age of AI
AI is reshaping every product decision. This toolkit is how you keep choosing the human one.
4 Phases of Empathy-Centered Design
Most teams start with the brief. This phase starts somewhere else, and it changes everything downstream.
🔒 Revealed inside
🔒 Revealed inside
🔒 Revealed inside
What's Inside the Toolkit
Designing with Empathy in AI
A complete framework for practicing empathy-centered design: from initial discovery to long-term trust.
- One of twelve checkpoints inside: the moment most teams mistake sympathy for empathy, and ship the wrong thing anyway
The other eleven, and what to do at each one, are in the toolkit.
Empathy mapping templates, design decision audits, and a Feel First design brief format.
- The single audit question that ends most "is this AI feature actually ethical" debates on the spot
The full worksheets, templates, and the rest of the audit are in the toolkit.
Built from the book, not just inspired by it.
Feel First started as the book I needed to write after too many projects where "user-centered" meant a persona slide, not a real practice. The Design Toolkit is the four-phase framework from the book, turned into something you actually run week to week.
A design team used Phase 1 of the toolkit before a redesign kickoff and uncovered that their actual users cared most about a workflow step the team had planned to cut, changing the entire scope of the project before a line of code was written.
Ready to design with empathy?
Download the toolkit and bring the Feel First method to your next design challenge.
Take Feel First Further
The toolkit is where the work begins. For teams ready to go deeper, we offer hands-on engagements that bring the Feel First framework to life, with your team, in your context.
A hands-on session for design teams, applying the Feel First framework to your real products, AI features, and design challenges.
A structured evaluation of your AI products and interfaces through an empathy lens, identifying gaps and opportunities for human-centered improvement.
Embedded strategic design partnership, bringing Feel First thinking to every phase of your product development cycle.
Train your design team to become certified Feel First practitioners, embedding human-centered AI design culture across your organization.