ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to present a narrative on how the Love and Break-up Letters method was used to build empathy with the Sharetribe users to develop the service into a global marketplace platform. The first version of Sharetribe was published in 2009 by Juho Makkonen and Antti Virolainen, who were then students at Aalto University. The chapter describes the development of the digital platform that took place while enhancing the experience initially provided back in 2013. Digital empathy is built by sharing feelings and emotions within computer-mediated communications. Empathy is directly related to feeling how the other feels, which can be extremely challenging given the complexity of a person’s experiences. It is especially problematic to place someone else in an empathetic position when this person does not experience the situation from the actual users’ points of view or from their cultural and life backgrounds.
