Empathy mapping is a tried and true tool for gathering user insights, communicating those to the product team, and ensuring that a product puts its users first.
empathy maps are comprised of four quadrants that capture a user’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and observations. They are best used in conjunction with a well-established user persona and experience diagram.
1. Observation
Observation is the process of noticing and recording information from a person or environment. It can be qualitative if only the presence or absence of an element is noted or quantitative if a numerical value is attached to the phenomenon being observed. Observation can also be social if an individual is participating in rituals or cultural practices that they are not accustomed to seeing from the outside.
During an empathy mapping session, teams work collaboratively to fill out a four-quadrant empathy map using their user feedback. This will include thoughts, feelings, actions, and observations based on the personas and experiences documented. Ideally, qualitative research and direct feedback should be used to complete this step. Once the map has been filled out, teams can begin to cluster and vocalize their findings. This allows them to agree on a common understanding of their users. Then, they can begin to create action items based on these insights. This helps them build empathy and ultimately better connect with their customers.
2. Listening
From the time we are little, we are often taught that listening is important. But few of us are ever provided with information about what listening really is or how to do it effectively.
To listen well requires a level of attention that is beyond simple hearing, beyond memorizing facts, and even beyond comprehending. It requires nondirective listening, a skill that allows the speaker to unburden their most deeply held thoughts and feelings. It is not easy. Even when we are not consciously judgmental, we tend to mentally criticize what is being said.
The empathy mapping process is a great way to distill, categorize and make sense of qualitative research like user interviews or field studies. A basic empathy map can be completed in a few minutes and offers valuable insight into your audience. A sparse empathy map indicates that more research is needed. Empathy maps can be used to create personas or as the basis for a journey map.
3. Observation of Others
Empathy mapping is a technique to help your team empathize with real customers. It’s an essential tool for product teams that want to avoid unconscious bias in their design process and create a product that’s truly valuable to users.
It starts with a customer persona, which is a representative of your target audience that has specific consumer traits and behaviors. Your team uses that persona to fill out a traditional empathy map, which has four quadrants: Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Observations.
Using sticky notes on a whiteboard, your team collaboratively moves through each quadrant and clusters together similar notes into categories (like “thoughts,” for example). You may have to clarify or correct some of the points in your empathy map, but that’s okay. The goal is to find themes that will allow your team to align on a deep understanding of end-users. It also helps you identify gaps in your understanding of your user.
4. Empathy Maps
Empathy maps are a great way to organize qualitative data from research like interviews, surveys, diary studies and listening sessions. They allow everyone in the team to digest and vocalize their understanding of a user by arranging data points into four quadrants.
This data is grouped by what the user SAID, DID, THOUGHT and FELT. For example, “says” might be a quote from an interview or a key word taken from a survey, and the rest of the information would be based on direct feedback from the user experience, observations, and research.
Using the empathy map to categorize and make sense of the research will help teams discover gaps in their understanding, and can also be used as a framework for creating personas. Empathy maps are a great tool to use throughout a UX process and should be updated regularly as new research is collected. They can be used as a foundation for all aspects of the design process from research to planning, user-facing experiences and technology.