UX Techniques for Empathy #2

Following on the Empathy series, here is another technique that can help you and your team to see the world through your users’ eyes. Empathy Maps!

Empathy maps

This technique is very helpful to organize qualitative data about the users and understand how they think, feel and behave on your products. At the same time, as it focus mainly on data gathered through interviews and observation of users’ behaviours, sometimes it might be a bit difficult to engage product teams in participating on it, specially if empathy maps were not done in the beginning of the design phase of the product.

The idea here is the total and complete focus on the user. It is about understanding how users think, feel and behave on your product by feeling a template with several quadrants: thinking and feeling, seeing, saying and doing, hearing, pain and gains (it can of course be customised to your product/organisation needs).

Empathy Map template (image from Whitney Hess blog Pleasure & Pain — by the way, you should totally check her work out!)

There is a simple workshop activity that can be facilitated with your product team and stakeholders. You organise a workshop where you simply print or draw in a whiteboard the empathy map template, and together with your team you start by putting yourselves in users shoes and fill each segment of the poster based on previous data and assumptions (in case you don’t have formal data). Don’t forget that what you include here should relate to a particular issue or be within a specific situation relevant to the product context.

If you already have personas, they can be a good starting-point for the empathy mapping exercise; if not, the empathy map can also help generating the personas.

Empathy map from the workshops by Better by Design

You can also simplify the activity by focusing only on Think, Feel, and Do.

Same advice as for personas, or any other UX deliverable, keep the empathy maps in a visible place to refer back to when presenting scenarios, defining a feature or designing a flow.

So how does empathy mapping helps increasing the empathy level of a product team towards the users?

Empathy Mapping helps us consider how other people are thinking and feeling. (http://goo.gl/EQS8P1)

By mapping what users are thinking, feeling, seeing, saying, doing and hearing, they help to create a more holistic view of the users. At the same time, this tool “invites others to internalize parts of the users’ experience in ways that listening to or reading a report cannot.” (http://goo.gl/EQS8P1)

Therefore, empathy maps help teams to put themselves in the users’ shoes, thus making it easier for them to consider what users might want from a product and how can this product meet theirs needs, goals and expectations.

Next on UX techniques for empathy series, I’ll write about the experience map.

Stay tuned!