Build empathy and design with your users' needs in mind
Use the empathy map canvas template to develop robust personas and inform decisions that improve the user experience. Get teams on the same page and create a visual representation of a customer’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and observations.
Empathy maps serve as a foundation for outstanding user experiences and new products that focus on providing the experience customers want rather than forcing design teams to rely on guesswork and assumptions.
While most empathy maps are divided into four quadrants, this empathy map canvas template uses more segments, which are typically defined by questions that teams work to answer one by one to complete the map.
Who is the the person you want to understand and empathize with? Start outlining the basics of the persona so your team has information to start building upon.
First, go over pain points. What are their fears, frustrations and anxieties? If your team comes up empty with ideas, try conducting user interviews to understand user attitudes and thought processes.
Once you have identified what their pains are, move into gains. What are their wants, needs, hopes and dreams? Be sure to log any other thoughts and feelings that might influence user behavior.
Answers to this question should come from interviews with customers, survey responses, or any other channel that provides direct feedback from customers. Try to include direct quotes from users in this section, such as, “I love this product; it saves me so much time every week.”
Be sure to include data about how the end user interacts with the platform or brand, including things like idle time, contacting support, or changing subscription plans. These objective metrics can help you measure and track improvements over time.
To answer these questions, think about the persona’s environment and the outside influences that surround them, including friends, colleagues, and media outlets. For example, their friends might discuss products they use at work or read an industry publication that ranks best-in-class productivity tools.
Don't forget other more subtle influences, like if they see a colleague in the office with a product that appears to be helping improve productivity.
It’s also important to ask what a customer stands to gain from using the product. Determine what pain points it solves by asking questions like, “What obstacles are customers trying to overcome?” or “How do users measure success/effectiveness?”
Analyze your findings and start outlining what changes need to be made in order to improve the customer experience.
An empathy map canvas is a more in-depth version of the original empathy map, which helps identify and describe the user’s needs and pain points. This provides valuable information for improving the user experience and informing a company’s business strategy.
Teams rely on user insights to map out what is important to their target audience, what influences them, and how they present themselves. This information is then used to create personas that help teams visualize users and empathize with them as individuals, rather than just as a vague marketing demographic or account number.
Agile teams in a variety of departments use empathy map canvases to better understand how to meet their customers’ needs during product development cycles.
Design teams use them to help understand the various reasons why a user might interact with the product so they can design a user-friendly experience.
Sales teams use them to learn who customers are at an individual level so they can help them invest in a product that suits their needs, rather than leading with a sales pitch that might be off-putting or not appropriately tailored to customers.
The empathy map canvas expands upon the original empathy map with a deeper emphasis on user motivations and consideration of influences that impact user decision-making.
An empathy map canvas is divided into four parts: what users think and feel, what they do and say, what they hear, and what they see. An empathy map consists of four slightly simpler parts: what users think, say, do, and feel.
The empathy map canvas provides basic instructions and prompts to help guide teams through its completion and streamline the process, which a basic empathy map does not do.
Empathy maps help brands provide a better experience for users by helping teams understand the perspectives and mindset of their customers. Using a template to create an empathy map canvas reduces the preparation time and standardizes the process so you create empathy map canvases of similar quality.
Mural is the only platform that offers both a shared workspace and training on the LUMA System™, a practical way to collaborate that anyone can learn and apply.