User interview? Check. What next?
User interview has always been a great way to extract information from users for user experience understanding, usability understanding and ideation. But what next? How can we make sure this empathy spreads beyond just the interviewer and benefits the whole team?
In Patsnap, as a UX researcher I sometimes encounter this problem: I did several user interviews, I shared to PMs, designers and other stakeholders of the team and... that’s it.
We would have some impact like fixing small bugs or building a small user experience improvement into our designs. But how to let every team member really know what is happening for the user - to think like a user thinks and feel like user feels - so that they can have empathy and build the product which can truly solve user’s problem?
Introducing the Empathy Map
So how can we transform the dozens of interview transcripts on our desk into meaningful results?
Here I introduce the Empathy Map, which allows us to sum up our learning from qualitative user research .
Normally, the map provides four major areas: what user said, what user did, what user thought and what user felt.
It’s fairly easy to determine what user said and did, but determining “thought” and “felt” should be based on careful observations and analysis. For example, how did the user behaved and responded to certain questions or suggestions?
The Empathy Map in Use
Since one of the key goals of the empathy map is for every member of the team to gain empathy with our users and better understand the problems users are facing, everyone participates in filling out the map, even if they were not present during the interviews. I set up and moderated a two-hour workshop to practice this methodology and invited our PMs and designers to join.
Fill out the Empathy Map
I put all the team members into three groups, with one PM and one Designer in each group. Each group was asked to fill out all four quadrants.
In order to do that, I printed interview transcript copies for each group. I asked each group to read all the scripts carefully, highlighting and taking notes on what they extract from the transcripts. Here are some tips I gave them:
- For what users SAY, you can write down significant quotes and key words that user said;
- For what users DID, you can describe which actions and behaviors you noticed;
- For what did users THINK, you need to dig deeper on this one by asking what do you think that user might be thinking? What are their motivations, goals, needs or desires?
- For what did users FEEL, it would be a little bit tricky to extract what emotions might user be feeling just from the transcripts, so I provided audio recordings for subtle cues like choice of words and tone of voice into account.
Once all the groups have done their part of information extraction and notes taken on the stickers, we drew the map on a whiteboard and started to present.
By presenting each key trait extracted from the user interviews, we were already able to synthesize some user needs by connecting some post-its together — an exciting learning!
After all three groups finished their presentation, we started to cluster all the post-its and fill in the map:
The empathy map we drew above only describes four key traits for one type of users. It will help you to build one user persona as an overview of user’s experience. By grouping different users based on goals, skill level, tasks, etc, you can draw different empathy maps for different group of users and these maps will eventually leads you to different personas.
Synthesize user needs
Filling out the empathy is the first step of analysis. A fully filled out empathy map will help you to extract user needs and construct user personas.
In our workshop, we reviewed all the post-it notes on the whiteboard together and identified user needs. This can be done either directly from the user traits on the notes or based on contradictions between two or more traits.
For example, we directly extracted that user needs a data permission setting in the system from one of a user FELTs:
Meanwhile, analysing a related “SAID”, “DID”, and “FELT” combination revealed a need for users to generate beautiful reports to please their boss:
Prioritize user needs
By adopting this method, we synthesized dozens of user needs from the empathy map. All the team members felt so excited with those findings and we then prioritized these user needs by using the Value/Cost metric.
The Value/Cost metric is a simple and easy-to-conduct method to prioritize user requirements and needs by considering both the value of the requirement to user and the cost for us to deliver it. The X-axis represents the value to users and the Y-axis represents the costs it would take us to implement. As a result, you can see that every need being placed in the second quadrant (upper-left section) will be the most prioritized ones since we put less effort but bring more values to our users. The fourth quadrant (bottom-right section) on the contrary, will be the last thing we consider since it has less value to users but needs us to put much more effort into it.
Since it’s quite a subjective process, we invited our tech leader to join us in this part to help us define the development cost of each user need. We ranked each user need from 1 to 5 at each dimension and discussed until we reached an agreement.
The final output listed all the user needs prioritized by Value/Cost metric. The results seem really promising to us since we found that there are quite a few user needs placed in the second quadrant which means we can put these user needs into our story pool right away. How inspiring is that?!
Wrapping UP
Sharing your findings to other stakeholders from interviews is essential, but just sharing what you summarized sometimes will have minimum impact on the product.
At PatSnap, we’ve tried the Empathy Map methodology to extract user needs from interviews. Involving stakeholders in the process brings a deeper understanding of the user’s experience to the team and helps the PMs prioritize stories to implement. It also helps the team construct user personas as it clusters different types of user goals, tasks, activities and problems.
Better Empathy? More impact from research? Building a better product? Check, check, and check.
