Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
<aside> 📕 Empathy mapping is what you do when you’re trying to get to know your users. It’s the first thing you do when understanding how your product is solving problems for your target user group. It should be a key part of your UX strategy design.
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Empathy mapping is a very useful tool as it helps to visualise your user’s attitudes and behaviours as a whole. Doing this kind of mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data, which I may have overlooked and establish who my users are.
Definition: 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 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making.
The format of empathy maps are split up into 4 sections (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user focused in the centre of the diagram
Traditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants, with the user or persona in the middle. Empathy maps provide a general insight into what our users could be without doing it in a specific order.
Example of what an empathy map format
The says section is used to explain what people say about a particular topic when brought up in conversation or in an interview. This is would ideally be directly quoted from someone that backs up a problem you trying to solve. For Example:
When considering the think section it refers to what a user may be thinking throughout their with this particular problem. For example, in my for putting issues case it might be: