An introduction to Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping is a quick and simple way to help understand and prioritise user needs.

An empathy map is a simple, easy-to-digest visual ‘map’ that captures knowledge about a user’s attitudes and behaviours. They are mainly used at the beginning stages of design projects to gain early insights into user needs.

Empathy mapping can help your charity identify the thoughts and feelings of different audience groups on a specific issue, such as fundraisers, using your new website.

The key word here is ‘empathy’ – this tool helps you to empathise with the audience by getting inside the users’ heads.

How can it benefit my charity?

• It is a collaborative tool that brings together multiple stakeholders and encourages sharing key information and insights, aligning audience understanding
• It can help initiate new ideas and decisions about design, content, marketing activity and messaging
• Information extracted can help devise questions and hypotheses for subsequent user research, such as audience interviews
• It can help redefine your priorities and provide new perceptions to a specific audience, including their needs, behaviours, and experiences

What is included in an empathy map?

There are 6 key areas of an empathy map for each audience group:

1. What are their needs (or the specific questions they might have)?
2. What actions are they taking?
3. What are their influences (people, things, or places)
4. How are they feeling
5. What pain points (challenges or blockers) do they face with what they are trying to do?
6. Our version of an empathy map also includes a section to detail the overall goal that someone may have

Empathy map example

Below is an example of what an empathy map layout can look like.

You can download a copy of this template to use yourself here.

When is it useful?

Conducting empathy mapping at the start of a project is valuable. It helps to quickly establish a consolidated, consistent, and detailed understanding of your audience.

We typically start a project off with a stakeholder workshop. This workshop would include representatives from across the charity, particularly those who directly work with the audience. This is extremely useful as they will have a wealth of knowledge about the audience group in focus. The information gathered during this workshop can help inform subsequent project phases, such as participant recruitment criteria of user testing or refining interview questions to ensure complete relevancy.

Some other use cases of empathy mapping:

• Provide background information for an SEO or content strategy
• Support the creation of audience personas
• Helping to fix a specific issue for an audience group
• Aid idea generation and campaign planning

Empathy mapping exercises

As a collaborative tool, empathy mapping works best when completed in groups, typically as part of a stakeholder workshop.

In the workshop, we split a group of stakeholders into small groups – usually no more than 5 or 6 people – then give each group a blank empathy map template, a few Sharpies and many Post-it notes.

Each group is then asked to imagine that they are that audience member, completing the map based on their feelings and knowledge about each section that needs to be mapped.

Group members must put themselves in the person’s shoes and ‘empathise’ with them and their situation.

Step 1 – Identifying the goals of this audience group

We often suggest groups start by completing the overall goal section on the map to help get into the audience’s mindset.

Things to consider are:

• What is the ultimate goal of the audience member?
• What are they trying to achieve?

Example scenario: For a charity looking to understand more about their audiences, a typical audience group could be ‘new donors’ and the topic to focus on would be ‘encouraging a donation’

Example overall goal: To donate to a worthy charity that represents their values.

Step 2 – Empathise with your audience group

Move on to each of the other segments within the empathy map and complete them one-by-one.

You can use the following as prompting questions to act as a guide:

Needs

• What tasks are they trying to complete
• What questions do they need to get answers to?

Scenario example for ‘needs’: Find out where their donations are being spent

Feelings

• What are they feeling about the experience?
• What matters to them?

Scenario example for ‘feelings’: Motivated to help make a difference

Actions

• What have they done about it?
• What have they tried?

Scenario example for ‘actions’: Read the latest information about what the charity is doing

Influences (seeing /hearing)

• What people, things or places influence how they act?

Scenario example for ‘influences’: Read an article in The Guardian about the impact of charity

Pain points

• What pain points might they be experiencing that they hope to overcome?

Scenario example for ‘pain points’: Can’t find the information they need on the website

Step 3 – Share your findings

After completing the empathy maps, we ask the groups to share their thoughts with the wider workshop attendees so that they can see what other people think.

The maps are sometimes moved around the room to allow others to contribute or add additional insight to them.

If there are multiple audience groups to cover, the exercise can be repeated for each of these.

Empathy mapping is a simple yet effective technique to help drive collaboration across your charity, allowing all stakeholders to share and align existing audience knowledge. The process can trigger ideas, support decisions and help prioritise. Equally, it can provide a solid foundation for ongoing project work.