An empathy map is a visualization tool that helps analyze and predict user value. It elaborates the thoughts and feelings of users towards a product and helps the project team make crucial decisions focusing on users rather than the product. In order to get the most out of your empathy maps, we have gathered some crucial empathy map tips to help improve your customer satisfaction.
Define the Main Purpose
Define your ideas and thoughts into a clear draft and formulate your purpose for creating an empathy map. This will drastically improve your result, team consensus, and overall analysis. It is important to have a purpose that will define the overall layout of your empathy map because it not only helps highlight the reasons for building a map but it can structure the entire exercise.
Defining purpose can also help you learn what the empathy map should target. It can either target task-based goals, or it can target broader organization-wide change. All of this is based on your purpose for creating an empathy map.
Focus on Defining your Persona
This tip is all about adding life and zeal to your persona. This includes writing their name, job, hobbies, and interests on the map. You can also add some details to make it more interesting for your team. Adding persona details is important because it will determine how narrow or broad the scope of your empathy map will be.
This tip will add more tangible character to your persona and will make the empathy map more targeted to your specific user groups.
Value Extensive Research
Like every other thing, empathy maps need research to be implemented appropriately. Before creating an empathy map, research why you need it, how you will utilize it, and what the results will be. For this, you have to conduct and value extensive research. This research can include customer interviews, reviews, queries, and experiences.
The more you hear and understand your users, the better you will be able to complete your empathy map.
Start Narrow
If you attempt to create an empathy map for a large group of users, it can be challenging to determine actionable steps to change their experience. To make things easier, try starting somewhere more narrow and expanding from there.
Try a small segment of users or even a single customer instead of creating an empathy map for your entire user base. This can lead to more actionable changes and feelings of accomplishment after you’re finished.
Customize Your Empathy Map
Empathy maps have an original template that’s easy to use, but it’s not the only one your team can utilize. You can customize your empathy map to better align with the goals of your team and fit the user feedback you’ve conducted. This customization is helpful because it can bring new dynamics to your empathy map that didn’t exist before.
Utilize Collaboration
Just as you value your user’s feedback, you must value your team’s opinion when creating actions based on your empathy map. You can add multiple collaborators to improve your designs and locate different possible actions to improve your user’s experience. When you collaborate on an empathy map, integrating multiple perspectives is key because it allows you to see a problem from multiple different angles, which can help expose solutions that weren’t previously accessible.
Create Actionable Solutions
Out of all the empathy map tips, this one is the most applicable across your entire workspace. It’s important that you don’t leave the exercise with only realizations – you need actions.
Make sure that, whether through a task manager or another board, you prioritize action items for your team to create tangible changes in the user experience. This is the whole point of creating an empathy map and is the only way that the user’s experience will change for the better.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these empathy map tips helped highlight some potential changes you can make internally that can allow you to get more out of your empathy mapping sessions. If you liked this article, read our other posts on empathy mapping benefits and how it relates to design thinking.
