Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping, along with other methods such as personas and customer journey mapping, allows teams to gain a common understanding of customers or stakeholder groups for a specific task or situation. They are a simple tool to gain context on customer groups. This means we create better solutions to meet their needs.  

These customer-centric approaches are all human-centered at their core, collaborative and highly visual, and can prove to be valuable for insight and as a storytelling device. 

Without empathy mapping when developing solutions there is an inclination to 

• focus on the work over the people connecting with it,  
• make assumptions about customers or stakeholders.  

This can result in gaps in what is developed due to an incomplete understanding. 

Empathy maps:  

• Provide greater understanding of the customer 
• Quick to create 
• Produce insights via themes that arise via collaboration 
• Support teams to reach a common understanding on customer groups 
• Customisable easily 
• Identify differences in what people say, think and do

What does a typical empathy map look like?

Typically, an empathy map is split into four quadrants, with sections for says, thinks, does and feels. Below the core empathy map there is also the option to capture opportunities and pain points in a section underneath. Ideally, teams include data and research when developing these tools to ensure they become high fidelity artefacts for customer-centric teams needing to delve deeper though research including observation and interviews.

Though this approach, you can develop a deeper understanding of your customers.

What are their needs and goals?
What motivates them?
Why do they behave in certain ways?
This allows you to design solutions better fit for purpose.