Did you know that users are more likely to choose, buy and use products that meet their needs as opposed to products that just meet their wants? An Empathy map will help you understand your user’s needs while you develop a deeper understanding of the persons you are designing for. There are many techniques you can use to develop this kind of empathy. An Empathy Map is just one tool that can help you empathise and synthesise your observations from the research phase, and draw out unexpected insights about your user’s needs.
An Empathy Map allows us to sum up our learning from engagements with people in the field of design research. The map provides four major areas in which to focus our attention on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience. Empathy maps are also great as a background for the construction of the personas that you would often want to create later.
An Empathy Map consists of four quadrants. The four quadrants reflect four key traits, which the user demonstrated/possessed during the observation/research stage. The four quadrants refer to what the user: Said, Did, Thought, and Felt. It’s fairly easy to determine what the user said and did. However, determining what they thought and felt should be based on careful observations and analysis as to how they behaved and responded to certain activities, suggestions, conversations, etc.
We designed the Empathy Map at XPLANE many years ago, as part of a human-centered design toolkit we call Gamestorming. This particular tool helps teams develop deep, shared understanding and empathy for other people. People use it to help them improve customer experience, to navigate organizational politics, to design better work environments, and a host of other things.
This article will teach you two popular design workshop techniques: empathy mapping and user journey mapping. Empathy mapping is a way to characterise your target users in order to make effective design decisions. User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively, identifying pain points and opportunities in a systematic and straightforward way.
C. Gagnon, and V. Côté. Proceedings of DRS 2014: Design’s Big Debates. Design Research Society Biennial International Conference 16-19 June 2014, Umeå, Sweden, Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden, (2014)
S. Fiore, P. Wright, and A. Edwards. CC '05: Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility, (August 2005)