How to use Empathy Maps to lay the foundation for great business ideas

Most new business ideas come from recognizing a problem people have and figuring out a better way to solve it. Empathy maps are a great tool for helping you recognize the problems and potential customers face.

What exactly is empathy?

Before taking a look at Empathy Maps, we should think about what empathy is. Put simply, empathy can be split into two separate parts:

1. The vivid experiencing of feelings, attitudes, thoughts, or emotions
2. The identification of another person’s feelings, attitudes, thoughts, or emotions

Empathy is important we developing new business ideas because being able to identify with the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of your potential customers dramatically increases your chances of success.

What is an Empathy Map?

Developed by XPLANE, an Empathy Map is a tool, utilized by businesses, big and small to gain a deeper insight into the minds of potential customers.

What do Empathy Maps look like?

The great thing about Empathy Maps is they’re simple. Although the shape, size, and overall design of Empathy Maps can vary, at their hearts, all Empathy Maps help you relate to your end customer.

Empathy maps consist of a face, or the outline of a human face, in the center of the map, which will then be surrounded by a number of different sections. Some Empathy Maps contain four sections:

• Thinking
• Seeing
• Doing
• Feeling

Whereas other Empathy Maps may have six sections:

• Hear
• Say and do
• See
• Think and feel
• Gain
• Pain

How to use an Empathy Map to generate new business ideas

Once you understand the basic concept, Empathy Maps are simple to use. An Empathy Map provides a great foundation for coming up with new business ideas by helping you better understand the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of your potential customers.

Here is a step-by-step guide to using an Empathy Map to lay the foundations of a killer business idea:

Before starting your Empathy Map you need to decide on two things, the type of customer you’re looking to target and the environment you’re interested in exploring. For example, your target audience could be pregnant women who are expecting their first child, and the environment you’re interested in could be eating out at out a restaurant.

Review any background research you have on your target audience and the environment. The background research could be articles and forum comments you’ve collected or something more formal like survey results or interview transcripts.

Next, print out your Empathy Map template on a large piece of paper, or alternatively, carefully draw it on a large whiteboard.

To get you started we’ve developed an empathy map template specifically for developing new business ideas.

Download Large 36" x 24" Download Small 11" x 8.5"

On the Empathy Map give your persona a name, a job and draw some features on the face. This may seem like frivolous details, but drawing and extra context helps build empathy with your target audience.

Armed with pens and post-it notes start to answer the following questions.

You are (your target audience) in (your chosen environment)….

• What do you hear?
• What do you see?
• What are you doing?
• What are you thinking?
• How does all this make you feel?

For each answer to each of the questions try to ask why or what at least three times to get a more detailed answer.

For example, our target audience is a pregnant woman in a restaurant. The first question you ask is, what does she hear? The initial answer maybe music.

Next ask what sort of music? The answer maybe — pop music, like Rihanna. Next ask, why is the restaurant playing pop music? Because it’s a busy lively place etc. Continue building up details like this.

As you ask the questions write the answers on sticky notes and add them to the Empathy Map.

Once you’ve added all your answers to the Empathy Map take some colored stickers or a marker and highlight any frustrations, annoyances or pains your persona is having.

To go back to our example, our target customer may be looking at the menu in front of her, but she’s feeling anxious and frustrated because it’s difficult to know if she can eat some of the items on the menu.