The Empathy Map

Description
What is it?

This is a collaboration tool that teams should use to acquire more of an understanding of their customers. Similar to a user persona, an empathy is used to embody a user group. This can be used as both a technique and a framework, and teams usually work with it using sticky notes.

Use this tool if you'd like to get more insight and understanding into the following things:

1. What have your users said?
2. What sort of behavior have you noticed?
3. What could their thoughts be?
4. What could they be feeling?

Identifying needs: 'Needs' can be defined as necessities whether physical or emotional. It's important to remember that these are things for which your user could use help with, and not solutions. Needs can be drawn directly from user characteristics that you have identified.

Identifying insights: 'Insights' can be defined as a realization that you could use to leverage initiatives. Often, these come out of identified contradictions between a couple of user characteristics, or from questioning unusual behavior. You could help yourself out here by noting 'tensions' and 'contradictions' as you go.

*Originally posted on TheToolKitProject.com*