We talk a lot about “falling in love with the problem” at Parux. Founders and stakeholders can often get hyper focused on their perceived solution. While the solution is the end-result, you need to first come to a comprehension on WHY you’re creating a solution. What is the problem (or likely problems) your user is experiencing? Empathy maps are a key tool that user experience (UX) design teams can leverage to help gain this knowledge.
What is an Empathy Map?
Used as a foundational UX tool, an empathy map is a visualization that communicates what we understand about our users. The map is segmented into four quadrants that are filled in with statements about an individual or a group of users based on interviews, surveys, and other feedback loops. Sometimes statements from users can overlap quadrants and that’s ok. Just do your best to categorize them.
Says
What the user vocalizes in an interview or written survey.
“I can’t tell the difference between Nike, Puma, Adias, etc”
“How do I know what shoe size is right for me in each brand?”
“I can never find the color combination I want.”
Thinks
What the user is thinking during the experience. Similar to “Says” but captures the underlying thoughts.
“I want an easier way to compare shoes across brands”
“I want to customize my shoes.”
Does
What the user does during the experience. Can be done in interviews or experience walk-throughs.
“Navigates to several retailers.”
“Switches between tabs to compare.”
“Constantly adjusting filter sets.”
Feels
What emotions the user feels during the experience.
“Excited to get new shoes.”
“Frustrated that they can’t find what they want.”
“Uneasy about whether their selection will fit.”
“Worried about getting the best deal.”
Why & When to Create an Empathy Map?
Empathy maps help the entire team come to an understanding of the user’s needs and emotions. For the empathy map to be most effective it needs to be done early on in your project. This can help you prioritize features on your roadmap. For example, if you see a common frustration showing up in different quadrants then maybe you need to make sure your planned feature that alleviates that pain is built early on in your product roadmap.
We also recommend creating an empathy map for each user type. Different user personas may have conflicting or affirming statements and feelings. This allows you to crystallize your product’s approach to creating your solution. Veteran, advanced users in your market may need shortcuts and quick paths to get tasks done while new, novice users may need options for advanced walkthroughs, step-by-step wizards, and more. You can also do this for your internal team as well. Discover what your development team needs for their code to be as high quality as possible!
How to Create an Empathy Map
Once you’ve collected user feedback through surveys, interviews, and processing other feedback loops you’re ready to start the empathy map process. The creation is best done in a real-time collaborative process.
Gather your team together based on who interacts with customers and can add empathy. Designers should be mandatory but it’s also nice to add leaders from customer support, sales, product managers, etc.
In-person or virtual is fine, but make sure you have a central visualization that everyone can interact with in real time. For in-person, a whiteboard works well. It’s fast and easy to set up. For virtual sessions, software like Figjam, Miro, and Lucidchart allows remote teams to collaborate in one file at once. This also eliminates the need to transcribe your results into a shareable, digital format.
Once your team is ready to meet you can follow this simple pattern to create your empathy map.
Setup
Create your visualizations with the four quadrants.
Inform
Set your ground rules. Let everyone know what is expected of the session. And most importantly, define who the user is that you’re mapping.
Ideate
Everyone begins working on their own to distill the research. Once they identify a statement to include, they add it to a quadrant. Statements can be short and unrefined and don’t worry about repeating statements. This stage can last for a while. Once the added statements start to slow down give everyone a 5 min warning.
Tip: Giving the customer research ahead of the meeting can help team members be prepared to add statements.
Refine
Come back together to discuss what was put on the board. What statements stand out? What themes are you seeing come through? Why does one quadrant have lots of comments while another has so little? Start to consolidate like-statements together, remove ones that the team agree are not accurate, and refine the language to be clearer. Additional statements are always welcomed to be added.
Complete
Once your discussion is wrapped up it’s time to do a final editing session to clean up the map visually. Typically, this is done by someone on the design team. Statements can be organized for readability, language tightened up and checked for errors, and the final product needs to be shared in a digital format.
Once you’ve completed your empathy map, make sure to share this as a key artifact in the project. The map should be referenced, reviewed, and refined through the project build. And new team members should review it during onboarding.
Conclusion
It may seem obvious, but understanding your users is key to project success. But you can’t just rely on intuition and undefined conclusions to make important product decisions. Empathy maps help teams come to a consensus about their users, making roadmap planning and feature creation much stronger. And if you combine empathy maps with other UX tools like user personas, user journey mapping, and more you’re on your way to creating a product that resonates with your users.
