It’s easy to fool yourself into believing that you understand your customers. It’s very common for teams to say that they have a solid understanding of their customers when they don’t.
Building solutions for your customers doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand them. In fact – I’d say that it’s a rare exception that I talk to a software team that has any idea about who their users really are.
This is how the typical conversation seems to go…
Me: How many of you feel like you have a good understanding of your users?
Team: (85 – 90% of the hands go up)
Me: How many of you have ever visited one of your users?
Team: (uncomfortable silence)
Well – I have to say that I’m not really satisfied to believe that you can understand your users by reading a requirements document or by writing code to implement features that somebody told somebody that told you to implement the functionality. Even if you are an Agile team – just putting a “why” at the end of your user story doesn’t mean that it’s valid.
Because this situation seems to be so common (and because I’m really sick of using software that sucks) I decided to try and find some low-effort / high-value ways to start to address this situation. One of these techniques that I’ve been using lately is a concept called Empathy Mapping. This can be a really powerful exercise and I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experiences so far.
I’ve seen Empathy Mapping pop up in a few different places over the past year and I’ve seen multiple people credited for the creation of the technique can be attributed to Scott Matthews of XPLANE. The technique has been described in The d.school Bootcamp Bootleg, Gamestorming, and Business Model Generation. All of the techniques are mostly the same and they all have the same goal of helping you or your team empathize with your users.

The basic technique is simple:
1. Draw a head in the middle of your paper.
2. Give it a name (this could be a role, a persona, a stakeholder, or a real user)
3. Put your place in your user’s shoes and indicate what you see, what you hear, how you feel, and what you think.
As you fill in the sensory areas, it’s common to find yourself guessing or doubting the validity of your answers. If you do the exercise as a team – it’s common to have disagreements and to have different individuals have vastly different understandings (or leaps of faith) about who your users really are or what they see, hear, feel, and so on. It’s very easy to find significant gaps in your understanding of your users. The exercise of filling in the map brings visibility into the gaps and visibility into the unknowns.
The Empathy Map can be a powerful exercise as a pre-cursor to doing any user-centered work (like creating a business model canvas, creating a story map, or putting together campaigns). The resulting map can also result in a wonderful visual to have around a team room or to review as you learn more about your users.
I encourage you to try out this exercise and see where you end up.