A guide to Empathy Mapping

According to the Oxford Dictionary:

Empathy is the the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

As UX professionals, we need to be empathetic. We need to understand the requirement of our users in order to design something for them. To achieve this, empathy map is used. It is a powerful and fundamental tool in UX design. Let’s take a look at what is empathy map and how it helps us to be better UX designers.

WHAT IS EMPATHY MAP?

An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to:

• Create a shared understanding of user needs
• Aid in decision making.

WHY DO WE NEED EMPATHY MAP?

Empathy map should be used throughout any UX process for the following reasons:

• Categorize and make sense of qualitative research
• Discover gaps in your current knowledge and identify the types of research needed to address it.
• Create personas by aligning and grouping empathy maps covering individual users

THE FOUR QUADRANT OF EMPATHY MAP

• The Say quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability study.
• The Think quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience.
• The Do quadrant encloses the actions the user takes.
• The Feel quadrant is the user’s emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context.

It’s natural to see juxtaposition and inconsistency between quadrants because users are complex humans. This is when empathy maps become treasure maps that can uncover nuggets of understanding about our user. The map can capture either one user (based on user interview, diary entry) or can reflect an aggregate of multiple users (multiple individual maps who exhibits similar behaviour).

HOW TO BUILD AN EMPATHY MAP?

First and foremost, think about the user or persona. Will you map a persona or an individual user? Always start with a 1:1 mapping (1 user/persona per empathy map).

Secondly, define your primary purpose for empathy mapping. Is it to align the team on your user? Is it to analyze an interview transcript?.Plan accordingly.

The other points to keep in mind are:

• Materials like sticky notes, white board that are needed for the mapping.
• Gather the research you will be using to fuel your empathy map.
• Cluster similar notes to arrive at a shared understanding of your user by all team members.
• Polish the map with additional quadrant (ex: add goals) if you feel like you need more details or have unique needs. Plan to circle back to the empathy map as more research is gathered or to guide UX decisions.

In a nutshell:

Empathy maps help us build empathy with our end users. The user attitudes and behaviours in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users and reveals loopholes in existing user data .