Empathy Mapping - An effective tool to Understand Your Users
INDRANIL PAUL
Building modern Gen-AI accelerator platform | Leading Product & Solutioning | Analytical Thinking | Product Growth Strategy | Certified SAFe 5 PO/PM | IIM Bangalore (Gold Medalist)
Empathy mapping is a critical part of the Design Thinking process. It is a visualization tool where the Product Managers & UX Designers gain powerful insights & in-depth understanding of the Users’ behavior – what they think, what they feel, what concerns they have, what they intend to do etc. so that you can Humanize Your Product in the most effective way.
Empathy is different from Sympathy. Being Sympathetic means being concerned about other’s feelings while being Empathetic means - actually taking on the other person’s feelings. To be empathetic you must be in the other person’s shoes and feel the same way he feels – so that you can internalize the psychological & behavioral traits of that person.
In the Design Thinking process, it is essential to understand the target users thoroughly with empathy, so that the product that you are trying to design & develop really fits into their life, solves their real problems & give much more extra (the Wow elements) in terms of the hidden wishes or likings.
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Empathy map helps in providing an outline & a guiding direction for Product Managers & UX Designers to portray the target user personas in the most comprehensive & easily understandable format – so that every stakeholder involved in the product design & development system attains a common ground. A standard Empathy Map gives a holistic all-around perspective of your Target User – What he Says, what he Thinks, how he Feels, and what he Does. These are the four quadrants of the Empathy Map that covers all relevant information about your User, to understand his needs, wishes, concerns & habits in one frame.
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Defining the Target User Segment and the Ideal User Persona are obvious steps for Product Managers before diving into creating Empathy Maps. At the discovery & Product Ideation stage, PM & UX researchers may come across multiple User Personas in their Target User Segment. Ideally, you choose the most prominent & prioritized one or two Personas out of them, and treat them as the Primary Personas for the following steps.
For example, you are developing a Health vital monitoring application that measures your Body Fat %, Blood Sugar, Oxygen Saturation & Heartbeat level, etc. on the go. As per the initial product ideation & hypothesis validation stage, let’s say we come across these four user personas and we choose Persona 2 & Persona 4 are going to be our Primary Personas, as most of the users are going to come from these two categories.
Once you decide on the Primary Persona, you need to identify 4-5 Users in each Persona Type and carry out a detailed interview with them. The interviews are completely subjective and detailed interaction-based information extraction & understanding of their unspoken words/ feelings. All the information gathered is clustered in four quadrants of the Empathy Map based on the type of information-
SAY quadrant: On this quadrant, the interviewer jots down the points that the User explicitly mentions or expresses – ideally the exact verbatim of the user is captured so that no information is lost or no possibility of misinterpretation.
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THINK quadrant: Points noted on the Think quadrant are very much subjective and depend on the UX researcher’s ability to rightly gauge the feelings of the user, as this information is not explicitly stated by the user. But somewhere down in his mind, the user thinks.
DOES quadrant: Does quadrant mentions the points that the User performs/ does in his daily life, any specific actions he is used to, any habit, routine work etc.
?FEEL quadrant: The UX researchers try to empathize with the user and try to internalize the same feelings that the User goes through, understand his emotional state, and mention those points on the Feel quadrant.?
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Once you create Empathy Map for all 4-5 different users within the same Persona group, try to classify or categorize the information under common buckets. These are the Common themes / Focus Areas, which are the guiding direction for defining the User Journey of your product - this process is called Theming.
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Empathy Mapping is one of the most effective and widely used tools by Product Managers & UX Designers to bring the ideal User’s mental dimensions on a piece of paper – thereby bringing transparency & informed decisioning abilities across the stakeholders involved in the design & development process. It gives the ability to PMs to logically decide what to focus on, which feature to prioritize, and what nuances should be brought into the product to give it an extra edge, that not only satisfies the need of users but gives a feeling of joy and a wow factor while interacting with the product.
That is where the success of the product lies…