Empathy Map

Empathy Map Workshop

What is an Empathy Map workshop?

This tactic helps your team to empathise with your audience so you can make better design decisions.

Getting people into the mind of the person they are solving a problem for impacts the solutions and ideas they come up with. And encouraging people to cultivate empathy in general might just help make the world a tiny bit less scary and divided than it sometimes seems.

Try Problem Statement beforehand to give you a clear problem to help you define your user’s goal. Afterwards, try putting your biggest assumptions about your user on to an Assumption Map.


Empathy Map Miro Template


How to run an Empathy Map workshop

1. Draw the following on a large surface:

Empathy Map

2. Write the goal of the user in the middle. For example, “buying a TV”.

3. Ask the group to spend ten minutes writing their assumptions on sticky notes for each section.

What is the user saying, thinking, doing, feeling about their goal?

What jobs does the user need to do? E.g., keep the kids entertained.

What pains do they have achieving their goal? E.g., too much tech jargon.

What do they stand to gain from their goal? E.g., peace and quiet.

4. Ask each participant to stick up and talk through their assumptions. Theme Sort as you go.

5. Use Assumption Map to decide which assumptions about your user you need to validate first.

Origin: Dave Gray, 2017

Not sure if this is the right approach for your team at the moment? Try a different tactic for understanding the problems and challenges you face. Or if you’re happy that you know what the next big challenge is for your team, try a framing tactic to help you articulate your problem, ready for solving.

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Empathy Map is one of 54 workshop recipe cards inside the Workshop Tactics card deck.

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