{"id":354,"date":"2020-04-15T15:47:27","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T12:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/persona.qcri.org\/blog\/?p=354"},"modified":"2021-03-18T11:53:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T08:53:00","slug":"personas-and-empathy-mapping-for-understanding-customers-and-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/persona.qcri.org\/blog\/personas-and-empathy-mapping-for-understanding-customers-and-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Personas and Empathy Mapping for Understanding Customers and Users"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a post from the APG Team’s summer 2020 intern, Jaad Mohammed.<\/em>
\n——–<\/p>\n

Personas are an effective way to target a specific customer base, since we have a better understanding of who that customer base is and what those customers want, need, or desire. In other words, personas provide a means to empathize with those customers.<\/p>\n

Through personas, we give our imaginary customer who was previously just some number on a market research spreadsheet a name and a face.<\/p>\n

So, now that you can see them as a real person, you empathize with how they might feel and react to a certain situation, and you can accordingly make developments for your product.<\/p>\n

\"Figure
Figure 1: Empathy Mapping Structure used with Personas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is where empathy mapping comes into the picture, which we integrate with your personas.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To make your personas feel more like a real person, you need to understand how a typical person represented by your personas would feel<\/strong>, think<\/strong>, say<\/strong> and do (see Figure 1)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The most effective way to do this empathy mapping is to conduct a workshop with key decision-makers of your product design. It also helps to refer to previously conducted customer surveys, if any, and\/or to conduct interviews with existing customers to gain more insight for empathy mapping. You can also use data-driven personas<\/a> to generate empathy points. APG<\/a> is one such data-driven persona system that you can use to help create an empathy mapping.<\/p>\n

For example, say there is an electronics store located near a university. The store\u2019s primary customers might be college students. Let\u2019s say there is a student, Sally who lives by herself in the university dorms — we have already started crafting of the personas from which to build am empathetic understanding! Sally likes to listen to music in her free time along with some of her friends. So, she may be looking for a set of speakers for her dorm room. Since she is a student, she might be on a tight budget. Now that we can empathize with Sally \u2026. note that we are already thinking of her as a person — the power of personas! \u2026 you can think of supplying speakers of an unknown brand that has good sound quality and fits into what you assume to be Sally\u2019s budget and other students like her. However, with data-driven personas, like APG, we might not need to assume things like budget about Sally. We may know.<\/p>\n

We can dissect the above example into the 4 basic elements of Empathy mapping:<\/p>\n

Sally<\/u><\/p>\n