Empathy Map: A Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head

When designers design a certain product, they are unable to understand actually what is going on inside a Customer’s head. How are they thinking or how can they react? What Designers can do, is they can ask, take surveys, and try to understand the feelings of the customers. After they understand the customers’ mindset, they begin to empathize.

So, Empathy is a critical part of a manually created design process. When a newbie joins work and faces much overload in the job process, what we can do, is empathize with him/her. In this article, I will discuss the whole process and the importance of the Empathy map. So pay attention!

What is an Empathy Map ?

An Empathy Map is a simple visual which helps in understanding and evaluating the feelings and needs of users. It is an essential tool for businesses to understand customers’ concerns and feelings. It involves activity in workshop sessions along with the stakeholders, and the marketing department to build empathy for users in need. 

Teams of different fields regard Empathy Mapping is an essential component that is needed to “ crawl inside a customer’s head.”

Whenever we search for a solution, an in-depth understanding of the problem is required beforehand. Only then can an effective solution be found. The Empathy maps help in understanding the problems from the user’s side, along with his/her goals.

In the early stage only, Empathy maps can be used to gain deep insights into the minds of users and approach them after knowing their side of the story. The Benefits of Empathy maps are:

• 1.  Helps in understanding the user in a better way.
• 2. Works faster and is inexpensive
• 3. You can have things customized as per your requirements.
• 4. Facilitates common understanding among teams.

If a session gets revealed when you would see there arise more questions than answers, then you probably know where most research is needed.

Creation of an empathy map

Data quality may be improved by creating empathy maps on the spot during interviews. Building a simple empathy map requires less time and effort from the user than building a more intricate one.

Firstly, collect any qualitative data. The materials that you need for creating an empathy map include some sheets of paper, moderate in size, colored notes, and a marker. You can sketch the map on your own, or you can print some templates that are available on the internet.

steps of creating one

Take one huge sheet of paper and split it up into smaller pieces. An emphasis is focused on the user whose mental state must be investigated. Each section around the user states the facts about his mindset: his actions, his sight, his hearing power, feelings( including his profits and losses). The full team working on the empathy maps will now fill in each part with the information learned via their study.

To begin, you must learn the person’s primary interest(s) and identify some of their primary objectives.

Take note of the individual’s name, occupation, etc. at this phase.

In the second step, try to understand the feelings of the person. What does he/she see – like the daily experiences of the person, the people around the person and their actions, what effects does the person has on his/her mind due to his competitor’s success? 

Next, you can research and assure yourself what are the daily actions that this person takes, how he/she reacts to different circumstances, and what is the person’s attitude towards life.

Now, the next important step is to assess the mind settings of the person. What does the person feel? What are the positive features about which the person constantly thinks? How does the person react to certain circumstances? Does he get frightened or anxious? Surprised or jealous?

Bring to life the person’s disappointments and triumphs.

summarise

After all the sections are complete, summarise what you have learned about the user. Taking into account the qualities you’ve read about and discussed, what is your overall impression of the person? Capture the different things and bring them all in a single frame and share them with your teammates and draw conclusions.

After the whole mapping gets complete, remember one thing. The Empathy maps are not the perfect guide that can shift your Organisation to the next level. It can only help to bring about changes in perspectives and build up improvements in the pattern in which the companies work. The purpose of the empathy maps is to help participants conducting research, to know about the person’s mindset.

tips for being better at empathy maping

1. Be slow, need not be in a hurry – Be slow in organizing information, and then placing and analyzing them into categories. Everything may become chaotic if you try to do it too quickly.

2. Only explore certain perspectives that are needed for Research-  the goals that you have for your project – every emotional aspect of the user need not be covered.

3.  Draw conclusions based on Good Research only contributing towards fulfilling your needs. You should only focus on what is really necessary for you and forget about the rest.

limitation of empathy mapping

1. Empathy maps must be used often to understand user experiences and sentiments. Without sufficient practice, drawing conclusions based on mapping won’t be easy.

2. They cannot act as a replacement for journey maps, as journey maps cover all perspectives of a user’s life, rather than the ones especially required for a project or survey.

However, the organizations that practice empathy mapping are doing great, because anticipating a customer’s behaviour is not that easy, and this is the way by which you can separate the Professionals from the newbies.

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