Empathy Map: How To Know What They Want
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” -John Dewey
THINKING TOOL
Empathy maps are a visualization tool applied broadly to user experience design. The primary purpose of an empathy map is to bridge the understanding of the consumer to the creator. The idea is to gain an understanding of the user’s needs and effectively work to meet them as a designer. The map provides four significant areas which act as an overview of a person’s experience. The four quadrants are as follows: see, say and do, hear, and think and feel. Put differently, it allows us to find out what the user says, thinks, does, and feels with relative accuracy.
By mapping out these aspects, organizations and individuals can align their strategies to address their target audience in a more personal manner. Better design. Clearer communication. Great decision-making. What’s not to love? Each of the quadrants explore a different facet of a user’s experience. The map is centered around a persona. A specific individual. If we wish to, like, really dig into an audience, we can add two more: pain and gain. The pain is the user’s challenges, frustrations, and obstacles. Their biggest, baddest struggles. What prevents them from achieving their goals. The gain is their desires, goals, and aspirations. What they want to achieve. What success means to them.
The core of empathy mapping is a user-centered design process. It’s a process that makes sure we create products and services that truly connect with users. Empathy maps go beyond what users explicitly state. They dig into hidden motivations, desires, and pain points. These are valuable nuggets as a designer. Every bit of comprehension helps. Plus the visual, concise, and appealing nature of them ensures everybody on the team understands and sees the same information. Teams are better lubricated when they use such frameworks.
The first quadrant, thinking and feeling encompasses a user’s internal world: their thoughts, emotions, worries, and aspirations, what occupies their thoughts most of the time, what they fear, and what excites them. The second quadrant, hearing, encapsulates external influences: the conversations, media, and opinions which shape the user’s worldviews, what advice and feedback they receive, what they hear from colleagues and friends, and what sources are most influential. The third are what the user’s see: what they observe in their physical, digital, and/or social surroundings. And the fourth and last quadrant captures the user’s outward behavior, or what they say and do, what they express verbally and how they act.
Real life implications of empathy mapping:
Product: understanding user frustrations to design product usability, like a streaming platform which redesigns its search function after discovering users frequently expressing frustration about finding niche content;
Marketing: creating messages that resonate with the user’s emotions and desires, such as a fitness brand that emphasizes empowerment and community to connect with users who seek motivation and belonging;
Customer service: training support teams to empathize with users’ pain points and providing solutions that highlight gains in alignment with their goals;
Team: using empathy maps to align cross-functional teams around a shared understanding of the user serves to align multiple departments, like engineering, design, and marketing on what matters most to users;
Education: educators, mentors, trainers, or coaches can tailor their approach to a learner’s needs, such as when a teacher identifies overwhelmed students and adjusts the curriculum to be mastery-oriented over quantity.
How you might employ empathy maps as a thinking tool: (1) define your focus, identifying what user persona or customer segment you are mapping, the more specific, the better; (2) gather data from interviews, surveys, and customer feedback to collect real-world insights and avoid making assumptions; (3) collaboratively map, employing diverse team members in the process to incorporate perspectives; (4) analyze contradictions, looking for mismatches between quadrants, such as users saying one thing but doing another, as these gaps reveal valuable insights; (5) refine the user journey, using it to identify areas for improvement in your product or service. How you could (should) foster a user-oriented mindset: (1) be empathetic, asking what your product, service, or message looks like from the user’s perspective; (2) use maps to understand the broader impact of a problem, not the surface-level symptoms; (3) iterate and improve, regularly revisiting and updating the map to ensure alignment with changing user needs.
Thought-provoking insights. “Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.” by Mohsin Hamid screams how critical perspective-taking is when aiming to design an effective solution to an existing problem. Make informed decisions. Reduce guesswork. Map. “To design for someone, you must become them.” although the author is unknown, this highlights a universal truth about design: it has to be a user-oriented process. Alignment is critical. Else we cannot connect to the user. Understanding their pains and gains is the only way to deliver things that truly resonate. Using empathy mapping, you bridge the gap between assumptions and genuine user needs. Comprehend your audience. Then deliver. Happy customers, happy businesses.