Empathy Mapping: What Moves Your Customer?
For innovators, understanding the people you’re designing for is crucial to creating products or services that truly meet their needs. One of the most effective ways to gain this understanding is through empathy mapping—a collaborative tool that helps teams visualize user attitudes and behaviors, aligning everyone on a deeper, shared understanding of the user.
Empathy maps are widely used in design and agile communities because they provide clarity, reveal gaps in user data, and ensure that your innovations are grounded in the real-world experiences of your users. This guide will walk you through empathy mapping, its benefits, and how to create one effectively.
What is Empathy Mapping?
An empathy map is a visual representation that helps you articulate what you know about your users. It helps teams better understand the user’s needs and emotions by categorizing their thoughts, feelings, actions, and words into four simple quadrants. These quadrants—Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels—are placed around a central user persona or target group.
The goal is to create a shared understanding of users, which can then guide decision-making throughout the design process. Empathy maps encourage teams to consider the emotional and behavioral aspects of the user experience, leading to more thoughtful, user-centered innovation.
Why Use Empathy Maps?
Empathy maps help you build a deep connection with your users and enable you to:
Align your team around a unified understanding of the user.
Uncover gaps in your knowledge about the user, signaling the need for further research.
Eliminate biases and assumptions, keeping the user’s real needs at the forefront.
Identify opportunities for innovation that directly address user pain points and desires.
By using empathy maps early in the design process, you can ensure that your solutions are both relevant and meaningful, which is essential for creating lasting impact.
Format of an Empathy Map
Traditional empathy maps are divided into four quadrants, each addressing a different aspect of the user’s experience:
Says: What the user says directly in interviews, feedback, or surveys. This includes specific quotes and phrases that reveal their expectations and desires.
Thinks: What the user is thinking during their experience, which may not always be vocalized. This could include doubts, worries, or mental reflections.
Does: The actions the user takes in response to a situation. What are they physically doing to accomplish their goals?
Feels: The user’s emotional state during their experience, such as frustration, excitement, or confusion.
These quadrants help you view the user holistically, capturing their motivations, behaviors, and emotional responses.
Empathy map from one of my classroom exercises.
One User vs. Multiple Users
Empathy maps can represent either:
A single user based on specific interviews or feedback, allowing for a more detailed understanding of that individual’s experience.
An aggregated user segment, combining data from multiple users with similar behaviors, which is useful for identifying patterns and trends within a larger group.
Aggregated empathy maps are often the first step toward creating user personas, providing a way to organize your qualitative research and extract themes that define a user group.
The Process: How to Build an Empathy Map
Follow these steps to create an empathy map that leads to meaningful insights and innovation:
1. Define the Scope and Goals
Start by deciding whose experience you’re mapping. Are you focusing on a specific persona or a segment of users? Clarify the purpose of the empathy map—is it for aligning your team, analyzing user data, or identifying gaps in research?
2. Gather Your Materials
Empathy mapping is a collaborative exercise. If working with a team, use a large whiteboard or digital tools for remote collaboration. Sticky notes and markers are useful for capturing ideas during brainstorming sessions.
3. Collect Research
Gather qualitative research such as user interviews, field studies, or survey responses. This data will fuel your empathy map, ensuring it’s based on real user experiences rather than assumptions.
4. Generate Sticky Notes for Each Quadrant
Have team members individually read through the research and write sticky notes for each quadrant: Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels. This helps bring different perspectives to the empathy map and encourages active participation.
5. Cluster and Synthesize
Once the sticky notes are on the board, work as a team to cluster similar themes within each quadrant. This step helps identify patterns and inconsistencies. If certain behaviors or feelings appear across multiple quadrants, they’re worth investigating further. This clustering process is where your team starts to align on a deeper understanding of the user.
6. Polish and Plan Next Steps
After clustering and synthesizing the information, clean up the map by adding additional details, adjusting quadrants, or digitizing the final version for future use. Make sure the empathy map is updated as you gather more data or conduct further research.
Why Empathy Maps Matter for Innovation
Empathy maps offer multiple advantages for would-be innovators. Here’s why they should be a part of your process:
Deep User Insights: They distill complex user emotions and behaviors into an easy-to-understand format, helping you see the human side of your audience.
Alignment and Focus: Empathy maps serve as a "north star," keeping the team focused on user needs and minimizing the risk of creating solutions based on assumptions.
Uncovering Opportunities: By exploring the contrasts between what users say, think, do, and feel, you can discover opportunities for innovation that might not be obvious through traditional research.
Building Empathy to Drive Innovation
Empathy mapping is the first step in a user-centered innovation process. By externalizing and analyzing user behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, you’ll create solutions that resonate with the people you’re designing for. Use empathy maps to align your team, remove biases, and drive user-informed innovation from the very start. With empathy at the core of your process, your designs will not only meet user needs but also inspire trust and loyalty.
Reach out for more at innovation@growthinnovationstrategy.com.
