1. IS6117 Electronic Business Development Project Lecture 3: Empathy Maps
Rob Gleasure

2. IS6117 Today’s session Online discussion Empathy maps What Why
How (a template)
When
Where
Empathy map design exercise

3. The next impossible problem
Most of whom we are, what we think, and how we experience the world occurs below the surface, meaning we often can’t or won’t externalise it
We want to be human-centric, not just rational-mind-centric
We need to engage with these ‘below the surface’ influences

4. What is an empathy map?
An empathy map is a tool to help you synthesise observations and get inside the skin of your users
Image from

5. What are empathy maps
Empathy maps help us to dig deeper into specific personas and create less superficial or over-rationalised understandings
They typically deconstruct a persona into four major components
What they say
What they do
What they think
What they feel
Empathy isn’t about facts and descriptions, it’s about the reason why people do things

6. Why empathy maps
Empathy gives us the ability to see the world from other people’s perspective and experience the world the way they do
Empathy helps us understand things that questioning alone couldn’t discover
Empathy =/= sympathy
Empathy =/= mind-reading
More fundamentally, empathy maps force us to balance real-world observations with a rich understanding of motivations and deep needs
Contradictions and gaps create opportunities for new insights

7. How to create empathy maps
Assume a beginner’s mind-set
Often the biggest barrier is our reluctance to let our own perspective go
Set aside all of your initial assumptions, where possible, and let yourself be dragged around to new perspectives freely
Don’t jump to judgement!
Look for extreme users
Use analogies where possible
This helps you to feel what the other person is feeling
If discussing with users, it also reassures those users you understand them

8. Exploring with questions
Analysis can often be structured roughly as what-how-why
Once you get the first ‘why’ answer, there is a rule of thumb that you should ask four more ‘why’ questions to get to the root cause
Often called the ‘5 whys’
This technique should ultimately tell you which process/part of a process failed

9. A template for empathy maps
Courtesy of Stanford Design Thinking Action Lab

10. A template for empathy maps
What do they say?
About the context/environment?
About specific processes?
About specific tools and technologies?
About specific people or groups?
What do they do?
What decisions do they have to make and when?
What are they paying attention to and when?
What emotions are they visibly showing at different times?
Does what they say and do contradict each other?

11. A template for empathy maps
What do they think?
About the context/environment?
About specific processes?
About specific tools and technologies?
About specific people or groups?
What do they feel?
Are they happy or sad about anything?
Are they angry or afraid about anything?
Are they anticipating or surprised by anything?
Do they trust or distrust anything?

12. When to use empathy maps?
An empathy map should be created for each persona at the outset
This empathy map should be revisited whenever you get a new piece of data, i.e.
A user says something interesting you hadn’t heard them say before
A user does something interesting you hadn’t seen them do before
If you’re doing interviews, you may also want to create an entirely new empathy map to summarise findings as part of debriefing with the design team
This can then be compared against the map for their persona

13. Where to use empathy maps
Unsurprisingly, empathy maps are mostly used in the empathise stage
They are often considered the foundation of the User Experience (UX) design
They’re also important at the end of each cycle as a way of comparing users’ thoughts and feelings when using a new product/service/practice/system

14. Exercise
Pick one persona you created in the last lecture and sketch out an empathy map for that persona
What is the sort of thing they say?
What is the sort of thing they do?
What is the sort of thing they think?
What is the sort of thing they feel?
Use the ‘5 whys’ to go deeper until you discover a cause for why they feel the way they do
Capture any insights as you create them
Summarise your persona’s need in one sentence

15. Reading
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & emotion, 6(3-4),
Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. Theories of emotion, in Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, Volume I, R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman (eds.), Academic Press, New York, pp. 3-3.
Interaction Design Foundation: The Basics of User Experience Design (