Empathy Map Workshop

Definition: 

The goal of an empathy map workshop is to help teams or stakeholders understand and prioritize user needs before designing a solution. Empathy workshops are used to:

• Understand who the relevant customers or users are
• Gain clarity and consensus on user needs, motivations, and behaviors
• Build empathy for users

 When & Why: 

Some common opportunities for empathy workshops across a high-level design process are:

• As soon as the project kicks off, so that you can share existing user insights with stakeholders, priming them to adopt a user-centric mindset from the beginning
• After new research has been conducted, so you can share results in order to shape a new potential design direction for the project

Empathy workshops typically occur at the beginning of a project or after some user research has been completed in order to:

• Shift stakeholder perspectives from a features-first mindset to a user-first mindset,
• Prime stakeholders with a user-centric attitude as the project gains momentum
• Share compelling user-research insights that may influence future design directions

Source: NNG