Beyond Personas – How To Rock Empathy Maps

You’ve done your user research, understand their problems, and now it’s time to communicate your insights to your team and stakeholders. You may be tempted to create a persona document, but there are major flaws! The persona you create may be a Frankenstein of your actual customers. You may take a little of this and a little of that from each user interview and the end result is a user that doesn’t exist, leading to incorrect product decisions and wasted time. Instead, try out lightweight empathy maps for each interview to help others connect with each of your users, showing the rainbow of possible customers as well as the commonalities.

I tried this new approach to empathy maps last week and it was a huge hit. I was inspired by this Practical Guide to Empathy Maps, made some tweaks, and ran it with five interviews. This format took well less than 10 minutes to complete for each call, led to visually engaging notes that my team actually read, and made user research fun. It’s the best experience I’ve had with documenting user research, and I hope you have great results too. Here’s my how-to guide to making one.

1. Customize your maps
   1. I’ve created a template map that you can use along with a script for calls. Create a copy of each to get started!
   2. Choose a set of default faces for folks who don’t have a photo on LinkedIn (more on that below). I took pictures from a set of vector avatars.
   3. Pick the demographic data you wish to track. This will populate the bottom of your map, and it helps if it’s visually engaging. I put:
      1. User’s country’s flag
      2. User’s company’s logo
      3. User’s role at their company
      4. Familiarity with our product (from 1-5 with stars)
      5. Familiarity with our problem space (from 1-5 with stars)
      6. Whether they’d buy our product as a big green check or red x
2. Research your user
   1. 1. There’s a lot about your user you can learn ahead of time! Look them up on LinkedIn to hopefully get their company, role, etc.
      2. Add the user’s name and other demographic info to the map.
      3. Grab the photo for the middle of the map. Here’s a clip of how to insert the image into the map:
   1.  Interview
      1. Run your call, follow your script, and you’ll get all the info you need to fill out your map. Especially look for soundbytes to add as quotes to the map.
3. Fill out your map
   1. Add it all in! If others joined you on your customer call, collaborate on the notes.
   2. Save your map to an image, share it with your team, and print it out as a visual radiator on your team’s walls.

That’s it, and hopefully your foray into empathy mapping is a great success. If you’re working with a new Product Manager, this is also a great lightweight way to both think holistically about a customer interview and to enable quick note-taking and communication. And while you’re at it, you should acquaint them with the classic empathy map, which just got an update from XPLANE, as there may be something you want to borrow from that too.