Rather than having the facilitator or full-time owner select personas for the empathy map session, have everyone choose one in advance. This can help increase the team’s sense of ownership and engagement.
Begin by gathering research that relates to your personas. This could include user interviews, field studies, or diary studies.
Understand Your Customers’ Needs
Empathy mapping allows you to see your customers’ needs and experiences with your products. You can use the results of empathy maps to create better products and services and improve customer satisfaction. It also helps you to understand what is important to your target audience, which is essential for building and maintaining relationships with them.
An empathy map is valuable for understanding your customer experience, especially for businesses with limited resources. It is a process that requires putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and exploring their thoughts, feelings, and observations about your product or service. It also helps you identify hidden user needs that you may not readily detect using other research methods.
Start by selecting a persona to focus on and then conduct research through surveys, interviews, or other means. Gather data that fits your persona and add it to an empathy map template. Divide the map into four sections or quadrants. Fill in each section with the observable world around your user, their internal mindset, and what they’re doing, seeing, hearing, thinking, and feeling (including pains and gains).
After you’ve completed all four quadrants of the empathy map, review and cluster together similar responses to form themes for each one. Then, compare and align with the rest of your team on the key insights you’ve found.
Create Better Products and Services
A well-developed empathy mapping template can help you understand your target audience’s pains and gains. With this information, you can create better products and services that meet their needs and wants. This will also improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
Start by creating a persona for your target customer. This should include demographic and psychographic information. Then conduct user research to collect data about their behaviors, attitudes, and goals. This data can be obtained through surveys, observations, and interviews. When performing this research, be sure to avoid unconscious bias. You may unknowingly overlook essential details about your user because of personal beliefs or assumptions.
Once you have a detailed profile of your user, begin creating an empathy map. Begin by labeling four boxes to represent their physical, social, mental, and emotional experiences. Then fill in each box with what they see, hear, think, and feel.
After completing the map, ask your team members to discuss and align their findings. They should vocalize the reasons they grouped specific data points into certain clusters. This will reveal gaps in your understanding of your user. For example, if your users are frustrated with the slow speed of your product’s loading time, you can design a new feature to increase its performance. This will help improve your user’s experience and result in happier customers.
Boost Customer Satisfaction
Empathy maps can help team members understand their customers’ needs and wants. They can then use that information to create better products and services to meet those needs. Additionally, they can use the information to develop more effective marketing and sales materials.
Empathic mapping is a collaborative and interactive process allowing teams to understand their target customer better. It enables them to see the world through their customer’s eyes and can be performed on whiteboards, poster boards, flip charts, sticky notes, slide templates, presentation software, or a digital mapping tool.
The team starts by selecting a user to map, then brainstorms around a series of categories that explore the person’s external, observable world and internal mindset: what they see, hear, say, think, and feel (including their pains and gains). The group then systematically fills in each of these quadrants with the information that they gathered through research.
As the team adds information to each quadrant, they look for related observations and try to find a common theme in their responses. This will help to make the empathy map more cohesive and easier to read. It’s also a good idea to take note of any areas that don’t have a clear or concise answer, as they can be a great source of inspiration for further research.
Increase Sales
Once you clearly understand what your customers want, the next step is to determine how you can meet those needs. An empathy map is an excellent way to do this. The map provides insights into your customers’ thoughts and feelings, which will help you create products that they will love to use. The map can also reveal hidden user needs you may not have considered. For example, your users may want to purchase a new computer, but they want software that will allow them to maintain their current computers.
To do an Empathy Map:
- Divide your team into small groups and have each select a persona to work with (or choose a persona yourself).
- Assign a section of the map to each group, such as “Thanks,” “Does,” or “Feels.”
- Allow them 10 – 15 minutes per section to fill it in.
- After everyone has finished, compare and discuss the results.
Using the information you’ve gathered from your audience research, map each piece of data to the corresponding quadrant of the empathy map. This can be done on a whiteboard, poster board, sticky notes, presentation templates, or an online mapping tool. Once all the responses are recorded, look for overlapping ideas and cluster them into more prominent themes. This will help you to find the most critical issues that need to be addressed.
