Empathy Tools

Empathy Maps

Empathy Maps are designed to assist you in fully understanding the motivations, concerns, and characteristics of your stakeholder/customer/user. In order to gain full empathy for a problem, these tools can be applied to all stakeholders. However, in the interest of time you will apply them to your Primary Stakeholder only.

• View the Empathy Map on your whiteboard - you will use this to create an imaginary person that reflects the needs of your primary stakeholders.

• Find a photo online that ideally represents what your primary stakeholder might look like.

• Copy and paste the photo at the center of your Empathy Map.

• Give your person a Name, and Description (ie. Bob Foreman, a Freshman IT major)

• As a group, use sticky notes to fill in information about your persona including

  • what he/she thinks and feels regarding the design challenge

  • what he/she hears from others about the design challenge

  • what he/she sees and witnesses in his/her environment regarding the design challenge

  • what he/she says to others regarding the design challenge

  • what are his/her pains, fears, and concerns regarding the design challenge

  • what are his/her gains, goals, needs

• Consider this person you’ve created whenever you are seeking to empathize with the stakeholder regarding insights and ideas you may have.

RESEARCH SENSE-MAKING AFFINITY MAP

Once you've gathered research data through your interviews, research, and empathy map, it's time to make sense of it all. Use Research Sense Making to collect and examine your many pieces of qualitative data and to gain a common understanding about the reality of the customer.

• View the Sense-making Affinity Map on your whiteboard.

• Each team member claim a work area -use one color for all your sticky notes so it’s easy to trace your work when sticky notes are shared.

• Working independently, catalog all of your insights and findings on sticky notes in your workspace, using short phrases (3 - 6 words).

• REMEMBER, you are noting insights about the problem, not jumping to solutions.

• As a group, share your notes with your team by dragging them into the share space, discussing each sticky note and working to create an Affinity Map. Group and arrange the notes based on their relation to each other.

  • Post all sticky notes on the whiteboard making them visible to the entire group.

  • Examine all the sticky notes, asking questions, and explaining your insights.

  • Rearrange the sticky notes into groups, putting notes that seem to be related together.

  • Discuss your groupings and come to consensus - the value in all of these exercise is the conversation that is generated!

  • Label the groups with large sticky notes.

• Add artifacts like photos, sketches or diagrams to the Affinity Map if available

• Identify patterns and insights and post in a separate space.

The insights and patterns you identify in this final process should inform your problem framing, ideation and the remaining Design Thinking stages.

 Select Key Insights

Team members should work independently to identify key insights from within all the insights on your Affinity Map - new knowledge that may hold a key to a solution. Drag Key Insights over to the Top Five frame on your whiteboard.

As a group decide on which are your top five key insights and place them in the list. Please a star in front of the insight that you think is most interesting.

Other Tools for Empathy

Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:

• Research Plan

• Ethnographic Tools: Interviews, Observation, Focus Groups, Desk Research, Surveys

• Personas

• Journey Maps

Check out the full course at www.innovation.fsu.edu/design.

Ideation Tools

 Mental Agility Warmup: Solutions A-Z

Come up with possible solutions to your design challenge utilizing every letter of the alphabet. For example, if you were working on Amazon’s shipping challenge, you might come up with [A]utomated robotic delivery, [B]ulk buying discounts, [C]ustomer pickup locations, [D]rones, etc. As a team, fill out at least one sticky note for each letter within five minutes.

Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.

The Brainstorming Mindset

• Go for quantity. Ideation is about generating as many ideas as possible, pushing your creativity, and building off one another's ideas. Crazy is encouraged!

• Don't Judge. Tap into everyone's creativity by being supportive. What seems unfeasible to you might be part of a great, disruptive concept. Don't shut people down. Instead respond with “yes! and…”

• Your sticky note is your voice. Write ideas down with just a few words. Use sticky notes to record your ideas, even if someone else is talking, capture it, and share it!

• Be Respectful. Ideation is energizing, and people can get excited. Make room for everyone, encourage introverts to share. Listen attentively and affirm understanding.

First Burst Affinity Map

GET IDEAS OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND INTO THE WORLD!

In this exercise you will use an affinity map as you did in Sense-Making, but here you will use it to share your ideas for solutions rather than your insights.

• View the First Burst Affinity Map on your whiteboard.

• Each team member claim a work area -use one color for all your sticky notes so it’s easy to trace your work when sticky notes are shared.

• Silently, independently, brainstorm, noting all your ideas for SOLUTIONS to your HMW - serious, crazy, and everything in between, on sticky notes in your private work space on the whiteboard.

• When you’ve accumulated a significant amount of sticky notes (ideas) share them with the group by dragging them into the Share Space on the Affinity Map.

• Group and cluster your ideas as they start to build up on the whiteboard. Label the groupings.

• Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.

Think Wrong Affinity Map

• Continue using the First Burst Affinity Map for this exercise.

• Generate three random words using https://randomwordgenerator.com/

• At the top of your Affinity Map, note the words you randomly generated using sticky Notes.

• Brainstorm independently and then as a group on ways in which your random words - all together, individually, or in pairs, can be applied to inspire a new solution to your Design Challenge. Experiment with changing the order of the words to see if that sparks any new ideas.

• Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.

• Example:

  • Design Challenge: Student Recruitment

  • Random Words: pump, majority, vexed

  • Word Associations:

    • pump up recruitment of minority students

    • Discover what vexes prospective students and solve the problem for them

    • Pumps transfer water or air from one place to another, consider building a pipeline from specific high schools or community colleges to your university

    • Survey incoming students to discover why the majority selected your institution

Brand Hack

Your team has been taken over by a prestigious company., develop ideas that fit under your new brand. For example, if you were taken over by Ikea, you might consider ways to flat pack your solution. Disney might provide a solution that was a themed experience, AirBnB might empower the public to provide services needed in order to make some extra cash. The brand logo for your group can be viewed in the Brand Hijack Affinity Map on your whiteboard.

In this case you can skip the independent brainstorming and go right to group collaboration. Feel free to do research online about the brand’s vision, mission, and values.

Place stars by the ideas that are most interesting and appealing.

Idea Filtering

It’s time to start filtering and selecting which ideas to move forward. In this activity, you begin to combine and narrow your ideas to converge on a solution.

Decide on the very best ideas that were generated through all of the methods above (look for the stars) and pull those sticky notes into the semi-finalist area on your whiteboard for consideration.

• Each team member fill out an Idea Card for your favorite solution. There should be at least three unique favs.

• Formulate unique descriptive names for each idea.

• Draw a priority map on the whiteboard (real or virtual), and as a group, plot each idea card on the priority map (with tape if needed). Discuss each card as it is plotted.

• The cards that are closest to the top right corner of the priority map should naturally present themselves as the best ideas. However, if the group is unable to agree on the best idea, utilize the Group Voting box on the idea card to vote for each idea. Each team member should place a hash mark below the emoji that best represents their feelings on each idea. Dot voting might also be considered as a voting mechanism. The ideas with the most smile hash-marks should be seriously considered for moving forward even if it is not the highest on the graph.

• This stage concludes with your team selecting the best idea to move forward into prototyping.

Other Tools for Ideation

Other tools that are useful in this phase of Design Thinking include:

• Gallery Stroll

• Brain Writing

Check out the full course at www.innovation.fsu.edu/design.