Have you ever had an empathetic moment? The feeling of joy at a friends wedding, or feeling upset when your cousin is crying. By definition empathy “is the ability to be aware of, understand, and sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts without having had the same experience.” There are five types of empathy, three in which you can experience and two which are suggested:
- Cognitive is putting yourself into another place to see their perspective. You empathize by thought.
- Emotional is when you feel another person’s emotion. You empathize by feel.
- Compassionate is when you understand by empathy by feeling someone’s pain and taking an initiative to help.
- Somatic is feeling some else’s pain physically
- Spiritual is a direct connection with a “higher being”
We have to understand these different types of empathy to participate in Empathy Design. Empathy Design allows us to be involved in the process of observation, data collection, and analysis and interactive prototyping. In other words, it is a way that designers can uncover peoples needs and address them through design. Once the basic understanding of empathy is achieved, we can now start to look at how empathy relates to design.
An empathy map helps UX designers understand their user. Also it helps a team understand and prioritize fundamentals tools.
An empathy map is a collaborative tool that design teams can use to have a better insight into their consumers. A map can represent a group or a singular person. These maps can help dive into customers segments of a given business model, elaborate a users persona, capture behaviors of customers, and build the users in a user story. A traditional empathy map contains four different parts:
- Think/Feel – what the user is thinking throughout experiences and records the user’s emotional state
- See – what a user sees in their environmental influences
- Say/Do – what a user says/does out loud and captures the actions a user takes
- Hear – what friends/family say impact the users thinking
The user or group is represented in the center. However, you can add two extra parts:
- Pain – what are the fears, frustrations and or obstacles a user’s faces
- Gain – what the user hopes to attain
When starting an empathy map, there are six easy steps:
- Define your scope and goals -Break each persona (if there are multiple) into its empathy map.
- Gather materials -If you are working individually or in a team, access to materials such as whiteboards, sticky notes, and markers, will allow you to share and view ideas easily and promptly.
- Collect research – When data is collected for an empathy map, you should use user interviews, field and diary studies, listening sessions, and or surveys.
- Create notes for each part of the map – Here is where the materials that were gathered comes into play. As you and your team take in all the data that was collected, members can fill in areas on the empathy map. The reason behind using sticky notes is because it provides mobility. Members can add/remove notes freely.
- Cluster and synthesize – Team members can move sticky information to the correct area, as they begin the process of vocalizing and aligning the findings.
- Polish and plan – You and or your team can add more details if need be. Be sure to add any questions that were not answered in each part of the empathy map.
Just like design, you will constantly be updating and gathering more research on a single persona. Therefore, an empathy map is never finished. As time progresses, a new question might arise and answers of previous ones might be answered.
Want to see what an empathy map looks like when it is filled out? Check out Undercover Boss Empathy
Bibliography
Bland, D. (2016, April 21). What Is an Empathy Map? Retrieved from https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/blog-post/what-is-an-empathy-map/
Battarbee, K., Suri, J., Howard, S., IDEO. (2014, January). Empathy On The Edge. Retrieved from https://5a5f89b8e10a225a44ac-ccbed124c38c4f7a3066210c073e7d55.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/files/pdfs/news/Empathy_on_the_Edge.pdf
thinking out loud 