Empathy mapping
An empathy map is a simple visual that maps out a customer’s persona by breaking down what influences them, such as their behavior, surroundings, and thoughts and feelings.
USE THIS PLAY TO...
Catalog and group your customers' needs.
Reinforce persona-based design thinking through an intimate understanding of your target customer.
If you're struggling with or on your Health Monitor, running this play might help.
People
3 - 6
Prep Time
15 min
Time
60 min
Difficulty
Moderate
Download
Running the play
Draw on interviews with actual customers before the session. The empathy map you create will organize the raw information from those interviews and turn them into insights your team can use when designing improvements to your product or service. Check out the Customer Interview and Contextual Inquiry plays for more details.
Prep
Select personas and prep the room (15 min)
Select 1 - 3 personas to explore during the session. They can be closely related, or wildly different. It's up to you to determine what's best suited for your team.
Book a room for 90 minutes, to include 15 minutes room preparation, and 15 minutes capture and tidy-up. Invite participants for the 1 hour in between. Include a link to the personas you've selected and any user research or data you have for everyone to review prior to the session.
In the 15 minutes prior to the hour session, draw the empathy map on butcher paper. Include an extra map that you'll use for demonstration at the beginning of the session. Print any project relevant data and personas so they can serve as cues.
Step 1
Set the stage (5 min)
Explain that the group's task for the next hour is to immerse themselves in the target personas. This isn't a sterile tick-the-box exercise you can sleepwalk your way through! Really step into their skin and imagine how they feel.
Review the homework, and introduce the personas.
Step 2
Demonstrate by doing (5 min)
Before you break into sub-groups, ensure the team have detached themselves from their biases and are prepared to morph into their customer persona. To get into the mood, choose an example persona that is unrelated to your product or service and run through a quick role play.
For example, you could choose "a 42-year old who likes breakfast cereal". Walk through the sections of the empathy map. What is that persona...
- Thinking and feeling about their worries or aspirations? (E.g., "Wants to stay healthy. Worries about their cholesterol level.")
- Hearing while using your product or service, from their friends or boss? (E.g., "Friends say high-fiber cereals are bland and tough to chew.")
- Seeing while using your product or service? (E.g., "Reads the cereal box, looking for nutritional information. Wonders how nutritious it is.")
- Saying and doing in public or in private while using your product or service? (E.g., "Talking with his wife, and preparing for the kids school drop off run.")
- Experiencing as a pain point or fear when using our product? (E.g., "Is annoyed our cereal gets soggy in milk quickly.")
- Experiencing as a positive or gain when using our product? (E.g., "Tasty breakfast! Usually don't feel hungry again until lunch time.")
Step 3
Fill in the empathy maps (15 min)
Divide the group into pairs or trios. Work out which sub-group tackles which persona, and allow 10 - 15 mins minutes to fill in their empathy map, depending on the number of small groups you have (the more small groups the less time – you'll need to leave more time for everyone to share their maps with the larger group).
Remember, you can create empathy maps for an existing product to better understand how your personas feel about it right now. Or, you can create the map with a new design in mind to help articulate how you want customers to feel about it in it's future state.
Pay special attention to pain points. The whole point of your project is to improve a product or service, right? Think about what the persona hears from friends or says about the product in terms of the pain they experience when using it.
Pro Tip
Feeling like a bit of fun? Bring in props like a hat, mask or shirt to wear so you really get into the customer persona's mindset.
Step 4
Present the empathy maps (30 min)
As each sub-group presents their map, encourage the full group to raise questions or items for discussion.
What insights does the map reveal? What assumptions are we making that need to be researched? Where do we have gaps in knowledge?
For example...
Here's an empathy map the Bitbucket team created for a persona that is young, eager, and energetic.
Step 5
Determine next steps (5 min)
Did you stumble on questions that need to be answered before moving ahead? Assumptions that need to be validated? Discuss as a group what you've learned from the empathy maps and how that can be applied as you work on your project or operate and improve your service.
Assign tasks, owners, and due dates as necessary.
Nailed it?
Be sure to run a full Health Monitor session or checkpoint with your team to see if you're improving.
Variations
Rather than having the facilitator or full-time owner select personas for the session, ask participants to choose them in advance of the session. This increases the group's sense of ownership and engagement.
Note that this variation works best when you don't have super-specific goals for the empathy mapping session and are looking to get a broad picture of your customers.
Follow-ups
Create JIRA issues to track the follow-up tasks.
If possible, hang the empathy maps in your team's area so you can refer to (and update!) them easily as the project rolls along.
This work, the 'Empathy Map', is a derivative of 'Empathy Map' by xplane.com used under CC BY-SA 3.0. This 'Empathy Map' is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 by Atlassian.
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