Empathy mapping
What is it?
Empathy mapping helps you understand and empathize with your target audience, users, or customers by capturing their perspectives, feelings, and needs. It's a visual tool commonly utilized in fields such as service design, UX (User Experience), and branding. This concept is often credited to Dave Gray, who played a significant role in popularizing it.
An empathy map consists of four distinct quadrants, each dedicated to a different aspect of an individual or group's experience: "think," "feel," "say," and "do." In the "think" quadrant, one can explore their thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. The "feel" quadrant delves into their emotions, attitudes, and reactions. Meanwhile, the "say" quadrant focuses on their expressed thoughts and words, and the "do" quadrant examines their observable behaviors and actions.
While not commonly associated with the presentation development process, empathy mapping can be a transformative tool for creating impactful content. By visually organizing and synthesizing information related to perspectives, motivations, and experiences, it enables teams to develop a deeper understanding and empathy toward their target audience. This, in turn, informs the development and design process, facilitating the creation of tailored content, storytelling, and design choices for presentations that effectively engage and resonate with the audience's needs.
When to useĀ itWhen you need to go beyond surface-level data and uncover insights that can shape content in a more human-centered way. |
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Step-by-step
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Get materials together You'll need a whiteboard or large sheet of paper to recreate the empathy map framework. You'll also need sticky notes, markers, and highlighters. |
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Define the purpose of empathy mapping Review the goals and desired outcomes of the presentation and think about the actions or responses you hope to inspire from the audience. For example, if you're developing internal training presentations for a large company, the goals may include enhancing employee knowledge, improving skills, fostering teamwork, or driving behavior change. The purpose of empathy mapping in this scenario would be to gain deep insights into the needs, perspectives, and experiences of the employees who will be attending the training. |
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Define personas Choose specific user personas or audience segments you want to understand better. These could be a hypothetical or real users. It's often beneficial to create multiple personas when you have a diverse audience with distinct characteristics and needs |
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Gather relevant research To create a solid foundation for your empathy map, you need to gather relevant research that provides insights into your target audience. Here are two common approaches:
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Draw the empathy map(s) Empathy maps can vary in their format, but they all share common core elements. For each persona, construct a separate empathy map by dividing a sheet of paper or whiteboard into four quadrants: Assign each quadrant one of the following headings: "Says," "Thinks," "Feels," and "Does." |
Fill in the empathy map(s) Start filling in the empathy map sections with data and insights related to your persona. Use sticky notes or markers for this.
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Analyze and identify patterns Step back and analyze the empathy maps for each persona. Look for commonalities, patterns, and recurring themes across the personas. Identify shared needs, pain points, motivations, and opportunities for improvement. |
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Translate insights Based on the patterns and insights derived from the empathy maps, identify responses that align with the goals and desired outcomes of the presentation. Determine how you can address the needs, pain points, and motivations of your audience. Use the empathy maps as a guide to develop content, activities, or strategies that resonate with the personas and inspire the desired reactions or behaviors. |