How to Better Understand The Users through Empathy Mapping
Being a UX Researcher, it is said that our main job is to empathize with the users. In order to help our team humanize the product we’re working on, we need to understand and empathize with the users. How do we make the users’ life easier with our product, what problems they are trying to solve with our product, how to make the users achieve their goal smoothly and efficiently through our product, etc. It is our job to be the advocate of our users so that the users’ needs are taken into consideration along with the business’ and products’ interest.
The term “empathy” itself is used to describe a wide range of experiences. It is generally defined as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. That said, an empathy map is a tool we can use to break down the aspects that we need to better understand the users of our product. An empathy map represents the sensory information of our users and is usually shown as four quadrants broken into “saying”, “thinking”, “doing”, and “feeling”.
How do we utilize the empathy map?
In user research, in depth interview is a commonly used research method when it comes to understanding the user as a whole. This method could be used in any stage of product development. The information we could gather in 30–60 minutes of an interview could be synthesized into many valuable insights to better understand our users, their attitudes and behavior and an empathy map could help us synthesize those findings into valuable insights regarding the users.
When I first joined the Lion Parcel team as a UX Researcher for the driver-facing app, one of the first things I wanted to know was the drivers’ overall journey and experience and as it turned out, it hadn’t been explored and documented yet. At that time, there was also a problem that arose regarding the time-limit set for the driver to pick up the package from the customer. Therefore, I and my then partner decided to conduct an exploratory research with in depth interview and observation to explore how the driver’s overall workflow and experience is, and if there are any obstacles or pain points they are facing through their journey, specifically in the pick-up journey.
After the data collection is done and the information around the end-to-end process of this pickup journey, the drivers’ concerns, frustration, and or pain points are gathered, it is time to synthesize the findings into insights.
Besides exploring how the driver journey is for the pickup process, as I stated before, there was also a specific issue we wanted to look into regarding the time limit. Based on the data, there are a lot of cases when the 90 minutes time limit for the driver to pick up the package from the customer is insufficient, making the pickup order to be passed to another driver and resulting in prolonged time for customers to wait for their package to be picked up. The assumption was that the 90 minutes time limit is insufficient, but then again, assumption can be an enemy for a good UX. So here’s the example of the findings broken down into the 4 quadrants of empathy map regarding this issue.
As mentioned earlier, an empathy map usually has four quadrants broken into “saying”, “thinking”, “doing”, and “feeling”.
The says quadrant contains what the user says out loud in the interview. It ideally contains verbatim.
- “I sometimes just accept pickup order from apps just to stop the notification since it’s annoying but I don’t really pick up the package”
The thinks quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience. In order to know what the user is thinking, we need to sympathize with them since they might have some things they’re reluctant to share with us.
- “The app would keep notifying me and coming back to me if I don’t take the order so I better accept it so it won’t bug me”
The does quadrant contains the actions the user takes
- Accepting pickup order and letting the time limit runs out
The feels quadrant explains the user’s emotional state. This usually contains an adjective followed with a bit of context.
- Annoyed if they have reject the pickup order but it keeps coming back to their app
From this alone, we already gathered valuable findings about driver behavior. It is found that when drivers accept a pickup order from their app, it doesn’t mean they would pick up the package. Some drivers turn out to just ignore the order they have accepted until the time limit runs out. This gave us an explanation as to why the overall time from searching the driver for the order to the package being finally picked up from the customer is still too long.
This will hurt the customers’ experience since they need to wait longer than they expected for their packages to be picked up because their order will be handled by a new driver who might do the same thing. On the other hand, this turned out to hurt drivers’ experience too because they’re “forced” to take the pickup request because even when they have rejected the request, it will still come back to them if there’s no other drivers who take it. This problem won’t be solved just by prolonging the time limit. Hence, one of the recommendations regarding this issue was to set a limit to how many times a driver can receive notification for the same order so that drivers won’t have to feel like they’re “forced” to accept the request just to stop the notification from bugging them.
The empathy map helps researchers get a clear picture of the user’s experience as a whole. Not just what they do and why they do it, but also how their emotional state is in the process. Empathy map provides callouts of key insights from the research and distills the information in one visual reference, making it easily digestible even for related stakeholders. It’s also easily customizable based on available information and goals and those are some of the many reasons why empathy map is a helpful tool to understand the users better.
Reference:
https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/empathy-mapping-a-guide-to-getting-inside-a-users-head/
