Empathy Maps

What is an Empathy Map?

Empathy maps helps design teams to understand the user’s mindset by capturing what a persona says during an interview or other usability study, thinks throughout the experience, the actions the user physically does, and the user’s feelings during the activity, in order to prioritize the user’s needs. Empathy maps are also great as a background for the construction of the personas that you would often want to create later. Empathy maps consist of four main areas. Each area represents important characteristics which the user exhibited during the observation or research phase. Each area of the map will show what the user says, thinks, feels and does. 

"An empathy map is a very quick, very rough persona template"

Images from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/

Microlearning

For More Information

• Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking (NN/g)
• Gamestorming Toolkit: Empathy Map
• Empathy Map – Why and How to Use It
• How to Run an Empathy & User Journey Mapping Workshop