Empathy Mapping
As a product manager, you not only need to deeply understand our users, but also help your colleagues understand them and prioritize their needs. Empathy maps are a powerful, fundamental tool for accomplishing both.
Traditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or persona in the middle. Empathy maps provide a glance into who a user is as a whole and are not ****chronological or sequential.
- The Says quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability study. Ideally, it contains verbatim and direct quotes from research.
- The Thinks quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience.
- The Does quadrant encloses the actions the user takes. From the research, what does the user physically do? How does the user go about doing it?
- The Feels quadrant is the user’s emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context.
Why should we use Empathy Maps?
The empathy-mapping process helps distill and categorize your knowledge of the user into one place. It can be used to:
- Categorize and make sense of qualitative research (research notes, survey answers, user-interview transcripts)
- Discover gaps in your current knowledge and identify the types of research needed to address it. A sparse empathy map indicates that more research needs to be done.
- Create personas by aligning and grouping empathy maps covering individual users
An empathy map is a quick, digestible way to illustrate user attitudes and behaviors. Once created, it should act as a source of truth throughout a project and protect it from bias or unfounded assumptions.
A question for you: Does empathy maps sound like user personas?
Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.
In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative.
Zone A: The lens provides constraints for the map by assigning (1) a persona (“who”) and (2) the scenario to be examined (“what”).
Zone B: The heart of the map is the visualized experience, usually aligned across (3) chunkable phases of the journey. The (4) actions, (5) thoughts, and (6) emotional experience of the user has throughout the journey can be supplemented with quotes or videos from research.
Zone C: The output should vary based on the business goal the map supports, but it could describe the insights and pain points discovered, and the (7) opportunities to focus on going forward, as well as (8) internal ownership.
How to build a journey map
- Define one persona, scenario, start point, and end point.
- Gather evidence from interviews, observation, support conversations, and analytics.
- Map stages, user actions, touchpoints, thoughts, and emotions.
- Mark moments of truth, pain points, handoffs, and unanswered questions.
- Add owners, opportunities, and a metric for the stage you plan to improve.
Do not create one “average customer journey” that hides important differences. A first-time buyer, returning subscriber, and support agent can experience the same service very differently. Build separate maps when the context, goal, or path changes materially.
An empathy map captures what you know about a user at a point in time; a journey map shows how an experience unfolds. Both should be evidence-based working documents, not decorative workshop outputs.