After completing my user personas, I wanted to delve deeper into each of my key user groups by completing an empathy map for each of my personas. Completing these empathy maps would give me the chance to explore more of these user’s needs, motivations and wants. It would also help me to gain a better insight for each user group and make better design decisions based on this greater understanding.
To create my empathy maps I used Miro as they have a very useful template I can use to complete the task. This template makes it very clear what sections I am looking at and makes the results easy to correlate and use to make decisions.
Miro Board Link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNvrblts=/?share_link_id=65017420204
My first empathy map was for Harriet my persona who volunteers with the Red Cross meeting refugees who have just arrived in the UK. Creating this empathy map allowed me to explore the influences around Harriet that effect her and what she thinks, this deeper understanding of how peoples environment affects them is useful to remember when considering users as it makes a difference to how they behave.
Here is my first empathy map:
I was able to work out a number of pain points for Harriet, not all of them for example public opinion are in the remit of a design solution, however issues such as helping with communication and skills are definitely something I could include in a design. The gain points for Harriet are definitely in her character her overall want to help more and do as much as she can mean she is someone who would be very interested in a design solution to the issues she sees.
My second empathy map is for Jay, a UK Border Force officer, while Jay meets people at the same stage as Harriet on their arrival in the UK, he does so in an official capacity as someone charged with protecting UK borders and security. I felt that looking at Jay alongside Harriet could show what differences this makes to attitude and how I could create a design that works for both the volunteer and the border force officer.
Here is Jay’s empathy map:
Jay’s pain points are similar in many ways to Harriet, he can see the issues people are having and would like to support them as well as communication difficulties. But he also has other issues such as not feeling supported in his work and feeling the government are focusing in the wrong area. His gain points are definitely similar he would welcome something to help to make his work easier and more efficient and he is definitely aware of issues in terms of people’s health and as a decent person wants to ensure people get suitable care.
While Harriet and Jay’s involvement with refugees is for different reasons they would both benefit from a similar design solution, one that assists with communication and supports ensuring people are getting what they need.
My third and final empathy map looks at things from the opposite perspective that of a refugee, while I am designing for the people dealing with and supporting refugees, refugees themselves will need to trust and feel comfortable when they see my design being used. Mistrust could lead them to not engage and that would render my design useless. While not my direct user, refugees need to be considered deeply in my design as they are a key component of it being successful and achieving the goals I have for it.
Looking at my empathy map for Al Rayan I could find a lot of negatives to fill each box, concerns, worries and fear seem to be the overwhelming emotions and this is something I need to consider in my design it needs to feel like it is helping people, they need to trust it otherwise they won’t engage with it and it will not help at all. I think it is important that people are able to understand what is going on as this will build trust and comfort in the process, so I will need to consider how I will achieve this in my design.
I feel that by delving deeper into my personas and completing empathy maps I have been able to drill down and discover more considerations for each of mu user personas. It is also a lot easier to see where the overlap between the three personas is and what features they all need. It is clear that communication is a key issue and that needs to be my focus, but how I onboard firstly users and then refugees on to the app is a key design challenge. I am wondering now that although normally you would try and take details first, whether it may be a better idea for this app to build trust through doing the basic health check before asking for details. Also having looked deeper at the asylum process and some pitfalls it will definitely be worth including some way of explaining these to people.