Take Away: Design Thinking in the Digital Age, Talent & Technology Symposium 2019

Miroslav Czadek
11 minutes ago
3 min read

I must admit that this symposium disappointed me a bit; evidently some speakers (both male and female) ventured into topics that were more theoretical and far beyond them. But if you fish in still water, sooner or later you will catch something. The lecture “Design Thinking in the Digital Age” was specific and enriching in that it interconnected different perspectives—it connected empathy with design and with a way of thinking.

Design thinking is a collaborative and inclusive journey for interdisciplinary teams to solve complex problems with a human focus.

The advantage is that design thinking is / uses:

multidisciplinary (e.g., various professions represented)
people-focused (design for people)
low-fidelity artifacts (e.g., post-its)
rapid prototyping
built on story

What caught my attention and what I will clearly use in coaching is the creation of an Empathy Map.

Empathy Map

An empathy map is a shared visualization used to express what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users so that:

a shared understanding of user needs is created, and
it helps with decision-making.

Format

Traditional empathy maps are divided into four quadrants (says, thinks, does, and feels), with the user or persona in the center. Empathy maps provide an overview of who the user is as a whole and are neither chronological nor sequential.

The Says quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or usability study. Ideally, it contains literal and direct quotes from research.

“They defend Delta because I’ve never had a bad experience with it.”
“I want something reliable.”
“I don’t understand how to get out of here.”

The Thinks quadrant captures what the user thinks throughout the entire experience. What is important to the user? Both the Says and Thinks quadrants may contain the same content. Pay special attention to what users think but may not be willing to share. Try to understand why they hesitate to share—are they unsure, confident, polite, or afraid to say something different?

“This is really uncomfortable.”
“Am I stupid for not understanding this?”

The Does quadrant includes the steps the user takes. What does the user physically do? How does the user do it?

Refreshes the page several times.
Shops around to compare prices.

The Feels quadrant is the user’s emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context. Ask yourself: what bothers them? What excites the user? How does the user feel about the experience?

Impatience: pages load too slowly
Confusion: too many conflicting prices
Fear: they are doing something wrong

Why use Empathy Maps?

Empathy maps should be used as part of any UX process (note: User Experience is usually understood as a set of techniques, methods, and rules that can be used in designing a specific user environment—websites, applications, or corporate systems, etc.) to create shared foundations among team members and to understand and prioritize user needs. In user-centered design, empathy maps are best used from the very beginning of the design process.

Both the process of creating an empathy map and the finished artifact have important benefits for an organization:

Capture who the user or persona is. The empathy-mapping process helps distill and categorize your knowledge of the user into one place. It can be used for:
Categorizing and making sense of qualitative research (research notes, survey responses, transcripts of user interviews)
Discovering gaps in your current knowledge and determining the types of research needed to address them. A sparse empathy map shows that more research needs to be done.
Creating a persona by aligning and grouping empathy maps that include individual users
Communicate the user or persona to others: An empathy map is a quick, digestible way to illustrate user attitudes and behaviors. Once created, it should be a source of truth across the entire project and protect it from biases or unfounded assumptions.