A guide to empathy mapping
Understanding the perspective of someone else is core to being able to make informed decisions about something we’re saying, doing, or creating that does not concern ourselves in its primary application.
It’s human nature to default to our own experiences and opinions to make these decisions, so even those of us trained to approach problems from all perspectives have to continually work to remove ego and ironically our own emotions when doing so.
What is empathy mapping?
Empathising with the user is a core part of the Design Thinking framework commonly applied in modern product environments. Its origins can be traced back to the 1960’s when academics and practitioners began to examine the creative strategies employed by designers to add more objectivity to their processes. It is now used to give structure to the pipeline of inputs & outputs, activities and outcomes that a team focussed on the human experiences deliver as part of the product life cycle.
The most common use case for this type of consideration is users of our products. As people in tech, whether it's architecture, data, or user experience (UX), most of the time we’re actually designing for humans and as we know far too well, humans are infinitely more complex than technology.
Empathy mapping is one such activity that falls within the ‘Empathise’ category and sets small groups of people out to consider a specific demographic of their user base, combined with a particular use case for that demographic.
You need a facilitator who will take the group through a predefined set of categories to brainstorm from the user's perspective.
- What is my user saying? (What emotions are they outwardly expressing to others)
- What is my user doing? (What physical manifestations of emotions might they display?)
- What is my user thinking? (What are they keeping to themselves)
- How is my user feeling? (What mental manifestations of emotions might they foster internally or display outwardly)
Doing this exercise as a group helps put everyone in the same frame of mind before moving onto the ‘define’ stage where the problems might be drawn out using the new collective perspective.
Running a face to face empathy mapping session
Here is a snapshot of a workshop I ran in person with a squad consisting of engineers, designers, and product people whose broad remit was ‘improve the existing payment experience’ in a B2C retail environment.
We had two use cases (rows on the left) and for 10 minutes the entire group added post-its across the four categories (along the top).
As content was being added, I used affinity sorting to group themes that were emerging from the hive mind.
For 30 minutes I then took the group through the board noting the larger groups of similar content and we discussed why the user might be over indexing in that space.
Ultimately this set us up for workshop activity two, assessing the current state of the UX.
Running a virtual empathy mapping session
No double this activity is fantastic to run in person on a big meeting room wall. However with our current hybrid working models it’s realistic that you’ll likely need to be able to run these sessions virtually too.
You can use our Hyperact empathy mapping template on Miro to try this yourself with a team.
You might notice some small differences on our template compared to the in person session above. The truth is you can be flexible with what content you collect depending on the use case.
Pains and gains helps the group think about what your users' motivations are and also what they're trying to avoid.
You’ll also notice we’ve added ‘hear’ as a new category. In some use cases your user might be influenced by their environment, surroundings, or people they interact with, and this can be really useful to capture and discuss.
Tip: make sure to keep up the momentum and follow up an empathy mapping session with a workshop or activities with your team to define and ideate how you’ll use your new perspective to drive change .
Alternative uses for empathy mapping
Here’s the not so common use for empathy mapping but one which I’ve used successfully to drive real change within a team.
In your internal working environment you’re likely to come across people who you conflict with for a variety of reasons such as personality clashes, differing KPIs / OKRs, or different work levels or departments.
These differences in attitudes, opinions, pains, and gains (remember those from the template) can affect certain aspects of working together such as:
- Influencing change
- Communicating value or progress
- Aligning on a goal
This may be incredibly frustrating for you or the team you’re working with and a combative or hostile environment can easily emerge from these conflicts which isn't useful for anyone.
Try using an empathy mapping template to consider a different perspective on why the person or team you’re clashing with might be coming across as abrasive.
I ran this with a client squad whose morale and productivity was affected by a lack of understanding of the value of the programme from the senior leadership team (SLT). The programme needed a fresh round of internal funding to finish critical foundational work and the business was stalling.
The team were able to garner a new perspective on why particular factions of the SLT might have been so defensive. This renewed the energy in the team and ultimately transformed how they were communicating the value and progress of the programme, which resulted in a renewal of funding.
Tips for running this activity for an internal stakeholder
Set clear context for this activity with the team. It’s often the case that it’s seen as a bit fluffy until afterwards when the value is clear. You may have your work cut out to convince certain types of people to attend.
It’s also important to make sure you create a safe space for people to be open. Set your working board up in a private area with a password and only allow access to those attending. This is a tool to understand complexities from a colleague which is likely to contain sensitive content.
