How To Empathize With Users: Empathy Map & User Pain Points

User empathy brings you closer to your potential user and helps you create positive user experiences. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings or thoughts in a situation.

When you have pity for someone, you feel sorry for them. But pity usually has condescending overtones. When you have sympathy for someone, you acknowledge their feelings, but you keep yourself from experiencing those feelings.

Empathy goes beyond sympathy. When you empathize with someone, you share their mental and emotional experiences.

UX design is not about solving problems we assume users want to be solved. It’s about solving problems that users actually want to be solved.

The better you are at anticipating a user’s desires and needs, the more comfortable the user will feel with your design, and the more likely they will be to engage with your product long-term.

How to empathize with users:

1. Ask lots of questions. Ask your users directly about their needs and wants, which your product design can address. Ask questions that begin with what, how, and why to gain a deeper understanding of your users’ perspectives.
2. Become more observant. Shift your focus to the whole user and not just the words they are using. In interviews where the user is physically present or on a video recording, watching a user interact with you or your product can provide physical cues that can affect your research outcomes. To help capture observations, you’ll take detailed notes or even record your sessions with users.
3. Be an active listener. Active listening requires you to fully concentrate on, understand, and remember what is being said by the user you’re interacting with. Avoid getting distracted by where the conversation is going or what you might say next. In UX design, practicing active listening can help you get impartial feedback directly from your users, which you can apply to improve your designs.
4. Request input. It’s important that the feedback you receive is objective and unbiased. Friends or colleagues often provide biased, mostly positive feedback because they want to support or please you. So, it’s important to request input from a variety of sources and a diverse group of users. When asking for feedback, use open-ended questions to understand the user’s actual thoughts on the experience or product.
5. Have an open mind. We all have biases. Remember, a bias is favoring or having prejudice against something or someone, based on limited information. As UX designers, we have to set those biases aside to better empathize with others. Your goal is to understand users, not to complicate their feedback with your own opinions and emotions.
6. Keep current on UX research. Follow researchers and join online communities to stay up-to-date on the research that affects UX designers and the users you’re designing for. Research is always changing and evolving as we understand more about human psychology.

Empathy means understanding someone’s feelings or thoughts, often by feeling the emotions yourself. Sympathy is the experience of showing concern or compassion without feeling the emotions themselves.

With a focus on empathy, you can design a product that offers users everything they need and more.

One way that we can visualize empathy is by creating an empathy map. Empathy maps are easily understood charts that explain everything UX designers have learned about a particular type of user. Empathy maps break down each interview into digestible pieces of information.

One-user empathy maps, which are empathy maps that are created by taking one user’s interview transcript and turning it into an empathy map.

An empathy map consists of four squares, which show what the user says, does, thinks, and feels. The word user goes in the middle right, where these squares intersect.

1. User’s name: User names help distinguish your empathy maps when you have to create a lot of them.

2. Says: what the user says during the interview. Use direct quotes if you can. Use verbatim quotes from the interview. In other words, write down exactly what the person said; don’t summarize it in your own words. If you summarize a quote, you might accidentally interpret the user’s meaning incorrectly.

• It’s also helpful to try to capture themes in the interview that relate to the product you’re researching. For example, if the user restates the same problem several times during the interview, then it’s probably a major pain point. Pay special attention to challenges your user states, and record any desired benefits or expectations they mention.

3. Thinks: what the user thinks. This includes things the user doesn’t actually say, but that you can tell through observation. Facial expressions are a great way to understand what a user is thinking. Here, you can summarize the thoughts expressed by the user. Add feelings the user conveyed through body language, tone, or other noticeable indicators, even if they didn’t verbally express them to you. You can make inferences for some of these feelings, but you have to be careful not to make assumptions about the user. You can always ask your user for clarification on their body language if you find any contradictions.

• Leaning toward the screen might indicate that she’s thinking, “This is really hard.”
• A furrowed brow might indicate that she is thinking, “This is really annoying.”

4. Does: what the user does during the interview. We should observe and record the user’s physical actions.

5. Feels: what the user feels. Directly ask her what she’s feeling during the interview, so long as it’s done in an open-ended way. List the feelings the user expresses. The notes you include may overlap with some of what you listed in the “THINKS” square. That’s okay! This process is meant to be a thorough documentation of your observations, like anger, frustration, excitement, and others. You can probe for feelings with the question: “How does this make you feel?”

An interview transcript is a typed or written version of a conversation that’s been recorded.

Types of empathy maps

1. One-user empathy maps: created by taking one user’s interview transcript and turning it into an empathy map. This approach helps designers distill a single user’s thoughts, feelings, and traits into a format that’s easier to gather data from.
2. Aggregated empathy maps (multiple-user empathy maps): represents a group of users who share similar thoughts, opinions, or qualities. created by creating multiple one-user empathy maps from interview transcripts, then combining the maps where users expressed similar things into a new empathy map. This helps designers identify segments, or groups of people with similar tendencies, who will use the product. Allow designers to identify themes, which helps them better empathize with the groups they are designing for.

The empathy map will help you break down and understand a user’s needs, behaviors, and motivations.

How to fill out the empathy map

• Fill in the name of the person you are creating the empathy map for in the center circle.
• Put notable things the user says during the interview in the top-left box. Use direct quotes if you can.
• Put notable things the user does during the interview in the bottom-left box.
• Put things you think the user thinks in the top-right box. This includes things the user doesn’t actually say, but that you can tell through observation.
• Finally, the bottom right square of the empathy map focuses on what the user feels. Note: When you conduct interviews ask what the user is feeling in an open-ended way and record the feelings they describe.

Reflect on the completion of the empathy map

• Did you use direct quotes when writing what the user says?
• Did you note important things the user does?
• Did you put what the user thinks, based on their quotes?
• Did you note how the user feels, based on what they said and how they expressed themselves?
• Did you incorporate perspectives that would inform inclusive design as you built your empathy map?

How to distinguish who is the user and what are their struggles?

• You need to do research to get into the user’s head and understand where they’re coming from.
• You also have to anticipate both the needs that users know they have and the needs they don’t know they have.

Everything that a UX designer does into a single role, that role would be problem-solver, and solving user struggles or pain points is number one on the list.

Pain points are any UX issues that frustrate the user and block the user from getting what they need.

Types of user pain points

1. Financial pain points: user problems related to money.
2. Product pain points: These are usually quality issues related to the product.
3. Process pain points: These are frustrations that stop the user going from point A to point B.
4. Support pain points. When users interact with your product, they might have questions. If they can’t find answers to their questions, they won’t feel supported.

Brain + Heart = User Experience

Empathy maps show us what the user thinks, says, does, and feels. Empathy maps help us get into the user’s mindset, allowing us to identify their pain points.

Pain Points vs. Solutions

When you can identify user pain points, you can develop more meaningful solutions. By identifying user pain points and examining how to solve them, you can research and design more effective user experiences.