What is it?

An empathy map is used to gain deeper insights and understandings of your user. It is a collaborative tool to understand their pains and gains and how we are able to bridge that gap with the design of our product and services. Much like a persona, an empathy map can represent a user or a group of users.

An empathy map consists of quadrants reflecting key traits, which the user demonstrated during the observation or research stage.

Purpose of empathy map

The empathy map are used when you want to deliver a better user experience of your product or service. Empathy maps can be used whenever you wish to learn or gain a greater learning of your user’s environment. It may be helpful to use empathy maps when you want to elaborate on user personas, capture your user’s behaviours, build out the user in your story or identify things you don’t know about your users yet so you can carry out new research to fill in those gaps.

Creating empathy maps

You can start creating empathy maps by assembling your team and having them bring any personas, data, or insights about the user. Then you would sketch the empathy map template on a whiteboard. Each member would then write down their thoughts on sticky notes and place them on the appropriate areas.

Think & Feel (head):

  • What would the user be thinking and feeling? What are some of their worries and aspirations?
  • What do they think about during the day?
  • Are they feeling stressed? Relaxed?
  • What other factors are they wondering about?

See (eye):

  • What would they see while using our product/service in their environment?
  • Are they highly visual?
  • Are they looking for great design or content?

Say & Do (mouth):

  • What might the user be saying and/or doing while using our product/service?
  • What are they telling other?
  • What actions are they taking on a day-to-day basis?

Hear (ear):

  • What would the user hear in this scenario?
  • What “self-talk” may be going through their head?

Pain:

  • What are some of the user’s pain points or fears when using our product/service?
  • What frustrates them about their current situation?
  • What are they moving away from?

Gain:

  • What gains might the user experience when using our product/service?
  • Where would they like to be?
  • What are they moving toward?

At the end of your session, as a team try to find the time to share thoughts about this exercise and the user. What insights have we gained? Does anyone have a new hypothesis? Afterwards, summarize and organize all of your thoughts, feelings, actions and sayings. Feel free to hang the completed empathy map in an area where people may pass by or create a shared document and send it out to additional members on your team. Encourage and invite people to add ideas or additional comments to the map!

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