"so much to learn from getting under other peoples skin"

Lately I have been vigorously writing my masters thesis. Today I read two nice texts which I want to quote:

"On a gloomy day, when nothing seemed to be going right, I once said to wearily to a colleague that I didn't want to go on doing observations for the rest of my working life. Actually that is not true. There is so much to learn from getting under other people's skin, being in their environments, and so much that can be drawn from it to improve the products and services people (including us) have to deal with.
There is genuine satisfaction in moving from what people need to ensuring it is realized; in negotiating within project teams, using persuasion, charm and (occasionally) bloody mindedness, to get the best results for the end users. There is even greateer satisfaction in seeing ordinary members of the public using things - from post boxes to personal organizers - where you know you have introduced a user perspective there might otherwise never been.

(Black Alison, 2003. Why I Work in User Experience Consulting. In Emphatic Design, user experience in product design (Koskinen et.al.). IT Press.)”

””Compassion” may, at first blush, appear o be a strange concept to stumble across in a work devoted to the nuts-and-bolts practice of usability engineering. But to my mind this is the idea at the heart of the discipline: being able to imagine, and share the frustrations of, the human users of the artifacts we design, in the hope that these frustrations can be reduced or eliminated.

(Greenfield Adam, 2003. Foreword. In The Psychology of Usability (Sinkkonen et.al.). IT Press)”