Sarah Gibbons, in her article Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking, describes the empathy map as a tool many UI designers use to create a successful and useful product. An empathy map, she explains, is a display used to combine knowledge about different kinds of users. It usually has four squares labeled Says, Thinks, Does and Fells, with an associated type of user in the middle. Says incorporates what the customer verbally wants, Thinks is what their thoughts are while using the product, Does describes the actions the user makes while exploring the product, and Feels is their emotional state while using different features of the UI. There are two types of empathy maps, One User and Multiple-User maps. One User is usually centered on people have provided insight on their preferred style of product. Multiple-User maps are broader and include multiple user comments that expressed similar thoughts and actions. Empathy maps provide a lot of beneficial uses to designers, as they give insight to how the user-base companies have feels about their products and how to design and create a better UX. Gibbons wrote steps in this process which includes choosing a specific goal and gathering materials to create the map, then actually collecting information from users to put all of the notes together so that a map is created. Then, using this information the designers can begin planning. This tool is designed to enhance UX experience by giving direct feedback to companies based on customers’ feelings about their product.
Gibbons, Sarah. Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking. Nielsen Norman Group, 14 Jan. 2018, www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/.