EMPATHY MAP

Hello again, today we will talk about a strategy to be able to offer an idea, service or product based on the needs of a person, as you saw in title today we will talk about the empathy map. When you're working you must make decisions about which things to cover and which not, in an ideal world we would have enough budget, time and we could analyze each scenario. So this empathy map tool helps us to make the best possible decision.



We say that it is a tool because it allows us to know what a user thinks, feels, listens and says. So it allows us to know the needs that our user may have. A better definition "An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making. (Gibbons,2018)

But I really don't want this to be another boring topic to learn about so I'm going to explain it with an exercise. We did this exercise in class, but before getting to the example I'm going to show you, I have to say that we practiced how to do it in class among my classmates, then in teams we had to interview the students from UPY so the students were the group to analyze, each one went out to look for students and fill out the empathy map, at the end we gathered the most representative characteristics as a team and created this one:

What we look for is to answer the following questions explained by (Amaresan, 2018)

1. What does the customer think and feel?
What are their beliefs, dreams, worries, and daily emotions? What makes them happy, sad, scared, emotional, and angry?

2. What does the customer hear?
Who do they hear from? What media are they influenced by?

3.-What does the customer see?
What are the sights surrounding their home, job, and other activities? Who do they see?

4.What does the customer say and do?
How do they behave in different settings -- in public, in private, with coworkers, with friends and family? How do they speak to others?

5.What are the customer's pains?
What frustrations and stresses do they encounter? What risks and threats do they face?

6. What are the customer's gains?
What do they need to be successful and achieve their goals? How do they measure success?


This empathy map did not come from just one person, but from all the people we interviewed in the team, we combined the results obtained, so we grouped the common characteristics of most of the interviewees, so in the end we obtained this synthesized empathy map. This is a practical help to synthesize the information from several empathy maps into one.
We chose Manuel Moo because all the interviewees always shared one of the characteristics presented by Manuel, so it is not much easier to know which aspects to attend to in order to satisfy the person's needs.

Some of the important points to use the empathy map are
- Capture who a user or persona is.
- Communicate a user or persona to others
- Collect data directly from the user.

So the next time you need to analyze a group or person, don't miss the opportunity to use the empathy map.

References

Nielsen Norman Group. 2020. Empathy Mapping: The First Step In Design Thinking. [online] Available at: <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/> [Accessed 10 March 2020].

The Interaction Design Foundation. 2020. Empathy Map – Why And How To Use It. [online] Available at: <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/empathy-map-why-and-how-to-use-it> [Accessed 10 March 2020].
Amaresan, S., 2020. What Is An Empathy Map & How To Create One. [online] Blog.hubspot.com. Available at: <https://blog.hubspot.com/service/empathy-map> [Accessed 10 March 2020].