Project Update
We continued to focus on data analysis this week; we finished empathy mapping all direct report interviews, and some of the manager interviews. Juan has opened a few channels of communication in an attempt to find former clients who have completed coaching engagements and might be willing to talk to us–as a startup, the operational/logistical part of UX research is often the most difficult. Larger companies with greater UX maturity often have existing pools of users that they use for research/testing purposes, but at Sounding Board, all of the recruitment work falls on the designers & researchers themselves.
Juan and I spent all day Friday affinity mapping. We took the data from individuals’ empathy maps and started to group it into key themes/patterns. The process really helped us process and synthesize our thoughts, and allowed us to identify some key questions/knowledge gaps that we want to take a look at next. Our goal is to eventually synthesize all of this data into persona cards that really strongly exemplify the trends we’re seeing in manager-direct report relationships.
I spoke to Janie (Head of Product and Design) about our results. We had an interesting discussion about how the research we’re doing now marks the beginning of a much larger process, and is one piece of the company’s reappraisal of the manager’s role in a coaching journey. Super exciting!
Readings
What are empathy maps?
Much like personas, empathy maps are a user-centered design method used to organize information about users in a digestible way. They are used to foster a more holistic and empathetic understanding of end users. Empathy maps most commonly have four quadrants: Says, Does, Thinks, and Feels. They are populated with interview data; for example, if a designer were to interview a customer, they would place their actions in the ‘Does’ quadrant, their emotions in the ‘Feels’ quadrant, their thoughts in the ‘Thinks’ quadrant, and direct quotes in the ‘Says’ quadrant. Aggregated empathy maps are also commonly used; rather than mapping an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and actions, a designer might gather data from several users and organize it within one map (Gibbons, 2018).
Empathy mapping can be a useful tool in the persona-creation process, as it allows designers to break down individual users’ data and spot patterns/emerging themes. The data can then be synthesized into a persona, or an archetypal user (Knight, 2019). In a 2015 study, a majority of participants reported that using an empathy map made persona-creation quicker, more productive. All of them agreed that empathy mapping made the process easier and more effective (Ferreira et al., 2015).
Although Juan and I have already created proto-personas, we’re planning to go back and revise them after analyzing our interview data through empathy mapping. We’ll flesh them out and present them to the design team some time in the next few weeks.
Sources
Ferreira, B., Silva, W., Oliveira, E., & Conte, T. (2015). Designing Personas with Empathy Map. 501–505. https://doi.org/10.18293/SEKE2015-152
Gibbons, S. (2018, January 14). Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/
Knight, W. (2019). Building Empathy. In W. Knight (Ed.), UX for Developers: How to Integrate User-Centered Design Principles Into Your Day-to-Day Development Work (pp. 83–101). Apress. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4227-8_7