How to create an Empathy Map? — Design Thinking Part 1

Kamal Kannan Sankarraj
Product Coalition
Published in
6 min readMay 22, 2019

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Empathy — it is an all too common word in product management. The importance of this word cannot be overstated.

Why Empathize?

Because as product managers, the problems we are trying to solve are rarely our own. Often we are building products to make the lives easy for users whose life, pains and experiences are completely different from ours.

Empathy therefore helps us get into their skin. It helps us define the problem we are trying to solve.

But I hear you — we all know this, empathy is important. Can you please tell me how to better empathize?

Now there are many techniques for this, I am going to take two of my favorite ones that have worked very well for me over the years — What|Why|How Method and Empathy Mapping. These are important aspects of human centered design.

Let us go through this with the help of an example. Let us say we are a trying to solve the issue of public parking for users. In a country like India, finding a parking space is an all time consuming process. Sounds like an interesting problem to solve..

What|Why|How

This is a particularly powerful tool that helps us gain deeper levels of understanding of the customer. This would be helpful when we have access to a particular user and are able to shadow the user’s life or have a video/photographic recording of his actions.

To use this technique I would recommend using a drawing board or a plain sheet of paper and divide it into 3 sections of What, Why and How.

The What

Now, go ahead, observe what the customer is doing and jot down the details. We need to be objective without making any interpretation of their actions. Documenting our observations as is would be the first step.

In our case, our observation could be something like the following — The customer first decides where to go. If the place is far away, he uses google maps to search for the place. Then he drives to the place but is not sure where to park. The parking lot just besides his destination is full. He has to keep roaming in the car until he can find a place with free parking space. He is willing to pay for parking, but is not aware of paid parking areas near the place. He somehow manage to park the car, but now has to walk quite a distance back to his destination. Unfortunately for him, once he comes close to his destination he finds a free parking space now. To add insult to injury it now dawns on him that he has to walk back the same distance to his car.

The How

In this section, document how the particular user is accomplishing the act that we captured in the ‘what’ section. Also document the user’s experience — Do they appear stressed, frustrated, happy, confused, in doubt? This is going to help us gain an understanding of the existing process and user’s pain points if any.

So in our example, let us observe and note how the user felt as he was searching for a parking space. The common adjectives that come to our mind are that — he appeared to have doubts on whether he will find the space, frustrated when he is struggling to find a space,confused as he does not know for how long he needs to drive before finding a space, feeling of ignorance as he does not know if there are paid parking lots nearby. Overall, it isn’t a happy experience.

The Why

The last step is where we need to put our observations in the above two sections into our own words. Try to interpret their experience when performing the action. Why is the user doing something in a certain way? We are free to make educated guesses about the users emotion or motivation here. We would often be surprised at how we may uncover certain behavior which would have overlooked otherwise. This step is intended to help us develop meaningful assumptions based on observations. These assumptions need to form the basis of our hypothesis and should be tested when we build our products.

So why did our user behave the way they did across his journey? Some of the educated interpretations in behavior that we can make are:

The user was anxious about unavailability of parking space and would love to be informed before hand.

The user is keen to park closer to the destination.

The user doesn’t mind paying for comfort.

The user would like to be able to quickly park.

The user would find it helpful if he knew when existing parking spaces would free?

These are all hypothesis that we could very well test.

Now you may think — I would anyway have done all of this by default why call this design thinking? Well, problems comes in varied shapes, sizes and complexity. And at times we may find ourselves lost. These techniques are meant to help us give some structure and direction so that we can approach complex problems and come up with innovative solutions. They often help uncover problems that customers do not state themselves.

Now, let us go to the next technique. Empathy Mapping.

Creating an Empathy Map

Creating a map of user empathy that you have discovered in your previous exercise helps you find patterns and gain unexpected insights. They help us make design decisions.

Jot down what we found out about our user when they are doing the current activity.

  • What do they say?
  • What do they see?
  • What do they feel?
  • What do they think?
Empathy Mapping Template

This will help us find patterns. For example — when we discuss with our user we might find that they

  1. Do — Look at google for destination, user maps to arrive at destination, ask people nearby for parking space, drive around looking for parking etc.
  2. See — Full parking lots. Lack of parking spaces.
  3. Say — they are frustrated due to unavailable spaces, ready to pay for parking, negotiating with people for parking, arguing with traffic constables etc.
  4. Think — how do I park closer to my destination, how do I find out which car will vacate sooner from their space, how do I find nearest paid parking, If only they knew there would be parking problems they might have booked a taxi etc.
  5. Hear — hears from friends that their destination doesnt have parking facility, hear from people on the location that there is parking some two blocks away, hear from friends that using taxi helps avoid parking problems.

Once we have created the empathy map, you would realize how it helps drive our design decisions. What would our customer think when he see this? Well, he used to feel this way before, would he feel differently if he performed the same action with our product? And so on and so forth. It also helps us identify customers pain points and areas of joy.

I would like to reiterate These techniques are meant to help us give some structure and direction so that we can approach complex problems and come up with innovative solutions. They often help uncover problems that customers do not state themselves. If you asked the customer directly they may tell you ‘what they need’ but often the critical pieces are the unstated needs of the customer. These techniques help us identify those unstated needs and identify patterns if any.

There are other tools like user journey mapping, engaging with extreme users, powers of ten, point of view, brainstorming etc that we can explore in our subsequent articles.

For part 2 of this series click here

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Product Manager — With experience across product companies based out of the UK, US and India. Currently based out of the UK. https://twitter.com/kamalkannan