1.3 Empathise
1.3.1 Objective
Now that you have collected plenty of information about the users and the context where the product will operate, it is time for you and the team to build empathy with your users. Understanding the pains, needs and challenges of these individuals and their context is key to building empathy. Developing a deep understanding of users and their environment will help you and the team make decisions and find solutions.
1.3.2 What you will be doing
1.3.3 Steps and tools you can use
a. Organise collected information
At this point there should be a number of assets and knowledge gathered from the discovery phase. It is time to start organising all information that was collected.
From the assets and results the team has collected and organised, it is important to start to bundle ideas per themes, finding common topics, patterns and ways to more easily digest all the information and key aspects found during the discovery
b. Analyse what you learned about the users and the context *🥇
With the team, review stories and results, and share what everyone has learned. Share stories with the team. Ideally everyone engaged in the discovery phase will have learned a lot and will have some stories on the top of their heads to share with the team. This exercise is helpful to start identifying what resonates the most and put everyone in the same mindset.
Make a summary of key findings and shared understanding of the user that will direct product design
c. Build tools for ideation *🥇
Prepare collaborative tools that will help you create ideas for how to meet the needs of your users. Have a look at this page to learn more. Some useful exercises that you can prepare:
Personas mapping
A persona, in user-centred design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. This will help the team identify and empathise with the needs, expectations and challenges through what we know and learn about this fictional character(s)
For your product, you may need to define 1 or more personas. For example, on Jerasaun Foun, 2 personas were mapped. One that represents mothers/pregnant woman that will enrol in the program (the beneficiary), and a second one representing the officers that will interact with the product/platform in other to enrol the first.
A simple way to get started is by using a board for a brainstorming exercise with the team (here is a Miro template that you can copy), and try to field it with all the information that is already known by the team.
After, you will want to do a synthesis of each mapping and persona, so that it is easy to read and to access by the team and other stakeholders. Here is a template and here an example of how Jerasaun Foun team used it.
Mind maps - empathy map, relational map , user journey map, …
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