Create an Empathy Map to Better Understand Your Customers

September 06, 2022Ashley Mae

An empathy map can help you figure out your users' needs and develop a deeper understanding of the customers you are designing for. This post covers what an empathy map, some empathy map examples, and how to create an empathy map is.

Part 1. What Is an Empathy Map
Part 2. Easy Way to Make an Empathy Map
Part 3. FAQs of Empathy Map Example

Part 1. What Is an Empathy Map

You may notice that most users are likelier to choose and buy products that meet their needs, not just their wants. An empathy map aims to help you empathize and synthesize your observations from the research phase and then draw out unexpected insights about your users' needs.

What is an empathy map used for

An empathy map is mainly used for identifying a customer's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. With empathy mapping, you can better understand their wants and needs. It usually includes four quadrants, thinks and feel, hear, see, and say and do.

By building a customer empathy map, you can imagine yourself as a user and gain valuable insights that can improve the product. Working with your product teams, you often use empathy mapping to improve the user experience and design a product that meets their needs.

Empathy map examples

As mentioned above, an empathy map typically includes four elements. So when you search for a suitable empathy map example, you should follow that. One of the easiest ways to quickly locate helpful empathy map templates is using Google search. You can open your Chrome browser and search for an empathy map example. You can easily access various templates for design thinking, customer, user, business, fitness, b2b, and more from the search results. You can click on the specific tab to see related empathy map examples.

When you search for empathy map examples on the internet, you can also get many recommendations from empathy map makers. You can go to their websites and find some ready-made templates.

Part 2. How to Create an Empathy Map Online and Free

To make an empathy map, you should gather qualitative research data and personas and collaborate with your team. After you find a suitable empathy map example online, you can start to create your empathy map.

Here we strongly recommend an easy-to-use online empathy map maker, MindOnMap, for you. It is specially designed for creating customer empathy maps, flowcharts, tree diagrams, and organizational charts. It provides you with various commonly-used themes, templates, and examples to quickly start an empathy map.

Step 1:

Open a web browser like Chrome, Safari, IE, Edge, Firefox, or Yahoo, search for MindOnMap, and then go to its official website. When you get to this empathy map maker, you can click the Create Your Mind Map button to move on.

Step 2:

You will be guided to its Log in to MindOnMap page. Here you can sign in with Google or email.

Step 3:

Click New on the left sidebar to display some popular themes and templates, including mind map, org-chart map, left map, right map, tree map, fishbone, and various themes to start the diagram creation. You can choose your preferred one to make a customer empathy map.

Step 4:

When you enter the main empathy map editing and creating page, you can freely click Theme, Style, Icon, or Outline on the right to quickly customize your empathy map according to your need. This online empathy map maker also offers some useful options in the top toolbar for you to insert images, links, comments, add nodes, add components, and undo or redo your operation.

Step 5:

After you create an empathy map, you can click on the Export button in the top-right corner to save your creation as an image, Word file, or PDF file. Also, you can simply click the Share button to generate a sharing link.

Extend Reading

Part 3. FAQs of Empathy Map Example

What are the benefits of empathy mapping?

Empathy mapping is useful for understanding your users, their needs, and what they want from your product. It is typically some firsthand data from your customers describing their thoughts on using your product. Through an empathy map, you can put yourself in the shoes of your users and better know how they approach and interact with a product. What's more, applying empathy mapping can easily visualize customer needs.

When should I use an empathy map?

You can often choose to create and use an empathy map. For instance, when you need to dive into the customer segments of a business, elaborate on user personas, capture your customer's behaviors, and build out the user in a user story. In the UX design process, you'd better use an empathy map from the very beginning of the process.

Is there any empathy map template offered in PowerPoint?

No. Even though PowerPoint has a shape library for you to create an empathy map in it. It does not offer any ready-made templates for you to make an empathy map or mind map. When you want to build an empathy map, you have to manually add different elements.

Conclusion

With a good empathy map, you can keep the end user in mind during the design process, quickly identify your customer pain points and desires to improve business strategy and get insight into the user experience. After reading this post, you can learn what an empathy map is, how to quickly find useful empathy map examples, and how to create a customer empathy map. If you still have any questions about empathy mapping, you can choose to leave us a message.

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