For User Experience (UX) design teams, understanding the user’s needs and desires is part of the first step in design thinking. In order to move forward in the design thinking process, a UX team must analyze the users’ needs and thoughts in order to make decisions about the next steps. This is where an Empathy Map comes in.
What is an Empathy Map?
An empathy map is a visualization tool that is used to express information about user needs. It helps people have a shared understanding about a certain group of users’ needs and helps teams to move forward in a decision-making process.
From my research, I have found that empathy maps are like windows into people’s minds; through the windows, researchers or designers are able to see what makes a user tick. Does the user like or dislike something related to the subject matter? How does the subject or topic being discussed or analyzed make the feel? How does this subject affect their actions? All of these questions can be answered with an empathy map, and with those answers, researchers and designers have a better chance of creating something that meets the needs of a large group of users.
Empathy Map Breakdown
Empath maps are generally split into four quadrants – Says, Thinks, Does and Feels – and the four quadrants can be listed in any order (Gibbons, 2018).
The Says quadrant contains information and quotes from what the users say. Here are some examples of feedback from users that could be found in the Says quadrant.
“I like shopping at Target because they always have what I am looking for and more.”
“This webpage confuses me because the navigation changed from the main menu to this point.”
The Thinks quadrant is a little more complex than the Says quadrant, but they can go hand-in-hand. It is important to use qualitative information that has also been gathered to understand what the user is thinking (Gibbons, 2018). What is the most important thing to the user? (Even if they don’t directly say it) Sometimes users can withhold comments because they are afraid that they are self-conscious or unsure of the process.
The Does quadrant is all about the actions that the user takes. Does a user squint when they are reading the text on a website? Does a user become impatient if the website has a lot of media and it takes a while to load?
The Feels quadrant targets the user’s emotions. What was the user feeling? Was the user anxious or excited about something? Did a part of the product, service or website annoy them? The Feel quadrant is usually an emotion with a reason why they felt that emotion.
Empathy Maps and the Next Steps
Empathy maps are complex tools that allow UX researchers and designers to take small samples from the map and incorporate it into the next steps. Sometimes the map will have varying segments of information that don’t always align… which can be expected. The Feels section might not always correlate with the Does section.
“You may encounter inconsistencies – for example, seemingly positive actions but negative quotes or emotions coming from the same user. This is when empathy maps become treasure maps that uncover nuggets of understanding about out user” (Gibbons, 2018).
Empathy maps also can be correlated with user personas (Munro, 2020). A user persona is an example of needs, characteristics and goals that are represented by a larger group of users. Empathy maps make up the ground word of user personas, which include behavior patterns, skills, attitudes and background/demographic information (Faller, 2019).
In addition, Lindsay Munro of Adobe explains that there are some pre-empathy map creation steps in order to have a successful empathy map. First, it is helpful to set a goal and a direction in which you want to go. In addition, conducting research ahead of time with reports, data and interviews with help with the empathy mapping process, as well.
The empathy map is a great tool that can act like a “North Star” in the research and design process. The map helps the researchers and designers to continue to move forward as a team and gives them a substantial direction to follow (Munro, 2020).
References
Faller, P. (17 Dec. 2019). Putting personas to work in UX design: What they are and why they’re important. Adobe XD Ideas. https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design/
Gibbons, S. (14 Jan 2018). Empathy mapping: The first step in design thinking. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/
Munro, L. (12 Jan. 2020). 10 Tips to develop better empathy maps. Adobe XD Ideas. https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/process/user-research/10-tips-develop-better-empathy-maps/
MAGGIE PRUITT 