For engineering design to be successful, it is essential to understand customer experience and identify customer needs. However, it is challenging to understand customers, especially those from different national cultures. The empathy literature suggests that having similar experiences to another person can help understand them better. This study adopts an empathy measure from psychology for use in a project where designers attempt to understand customers’ driving experiences in different countries and identify their needs for detecting road hazards. We quantify designers’ empathic accuracy and the correctness of their rating of customers’ emotional tone. The results show that national cultural differences significantly affect the accuracy of designers’ empathic understanding but do not impact their understanding of customers’ emotional tone.

要使工程设计取得成功，了解客户体验和识别客户需求至关重要。然而，了解客户具有挑战性，尤其是来自不同国家文化的客户。同理心文献表明，与另一个人有相似的经历可以帮助更好地理解他们。本研究采用心理学中的移情量度，用于一个项目，在该项目中，设计师试图了解客户在不同国家的驾驶体验，并确定他们对检测道路危险的需求。我们量化设计师的移情准确性和他们对客户情绪基调评级的正确性。结果表明，民族文化差异显着影响设计师移情理解的准确性，但不影响他们对客户情绪基调的理解。