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What is empathy mapping?
A simple guide on how to get into your user’s heads.
Empathy mapping is what you do when you’re trying to get to know your users. It’s the first thing you do when understanding how your product is solving problems for your target user group. It should be a key part of your UX strategy design.
An empathy map is usually the step before you create needs statements and personas. It is best to do them immediately after a customer interview.
Why do we do empathy maps?
We do empathy maps to empathize with our users to understand what they’re feeling and thinking, it’s very important because it allows us to get into the mind of the user and understand why they do the things they do. When talking to somebody you need to conduct a user interview, you can learn more about how to do that in my other article here. The empathy map is how you theme the interview insights and break them down into different categories to give you an overall picture of the person and their wants and needs.
Create your empathy map
Using design thinking methodology we break down our notes into four main character categories. The categories are: think, say, feel, and do. You can also add pains and gains as you work through your questions to understand the problems and how your product is trying to solve them.
Use post-notes to capture each observation, you should end up with a few stacks worth of notes. After the session, you can then start putting each note into one of the 4 sections, think, say, feel, and do.
Another tip is I usually use a happy face :-) for gains and the sad face :( for pains. This helps as you theme them to see patterns.
To create an empathy board you need to 1st draw a picture of the user which is just a :-) in the middle. I use this space to put personal information which might be their age, how many children they have, what they do for a job or any personal info so you have it recorded. The map should also be clearly labeled with the dates, customer name, what product and why.
