This week’s class was dedicated to tutorials a great opportunity to show our work to our lecturer and get some useful feedback as we head towards our final design critique and the end of the semester. As there was no lecture this week I thought I would take the opportunity to look at a useful technique for getting into the mindset of users; Empathy Mapping.
I was recently involved in a meeting at work where we as a team were trying to come up with ideas for a new volunteering program. As part of this meeting, we did a workshop that incorporated some design thinking methods to help us understand our users and think about the possibilities from their point of view. One of the techniques we used was empathy mapping and I found it to be a very helpful way to think about the needs and motivations of users, so I have decided to look at the technique in some more detail.
Firstly, I decided to get a solid definition for what an empathy map is and found this definition from the Nielsen Norman Group:
“An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making.”
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/ (Last Accessed 01/01/24)
In more simplistic terms an empathy map allows us to put down on paper what we know about are target audience so that as a design team we can all understand our users and help us make informed design decisions.
To do this, we would need to have conducted research into our users and with our users, either through surveys, questionnaires or interviews. Then we can use either individual empathy maps to show what we have learnt from a particular user or aggregated empathy maps for a group of users with similar views or to show overarching trends from multiple users.
While doing empathy maps after conducting user research is ideal, doing empathy maps without the user research can also be useful to 1. Reveal your assumptions and 2. Find out where to focus your research to fill gaps in your knowledge. This can allow you to better focus your user research and challenge your assumptions before proceeding with the rest of the design process.
At its core empathy mapping is a simple process, you place the name of your user at the centre and around them you have four quadrants which you fill out. These are what your user says, does, thinks and feels.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/ (Last Accessed 01/01/24)
In the says section you want to put down quotes from a user, preferably something they have said in a research interview or in an open answer to a survey question. However, you can always surmise what they would say from other data and then frame this in a quote.
The thinks section is where you need to look at your research and put yourself in your user’s position to work out what hey would be thinking. Some of these thoughts may align with the quotes they made, but there may also be other things that they chose not to verbalise, and these insights may provide greater depth to your understanding.
The does section is where you put the actions a user takes this may be research before purchasing a product or speaking with friends about a particular issue. This can be very useful in working out the steps a user takes before interacting with a product or service and therefore help us build a user journey that can fit with their current habits.
The feels section is where we place our user’s feelings and emotion usually in the form of the feeling/emotion itself followed by a statement to describe why they have encountered that feeling. For example: Frustrated, Due to lack of a suitable product on the market.
As you can see from this, we get a very thorough insight into our user and can start to look at what ways our design could solve negatives and provide positives in a given situation.
When I am looking to create an empathy map, I start by using this template on Miro:
