Empathy Map

Empathy is a critical ingredient of human-centric design. It is true that many a times

designers working on energy efficient sustainable products rely purely on their intuition and
feelings, thus neglecting the target audience. An empathy map allows you to capture and
organize the user’s attitudes and behaviors in a visual format. The four quadrants in the
empathy map explains what the user said, felt, thought or did.
In preparing the empathy map for the case at hand, we analyzed the environmental
orientation of potential customers for energy efficient products, i.e., their attitude and
behavior towards environmental conservation. Let us analyze some of these empathy maps in
detail.
Kavitha’s Empathy Map

As is evident from the empathy map, Kavitha has positive feelings and thoughts towards
environmental conservation. She acknowledges that there is an increasing need of energy
efficient and sustainable products in order to contribute to the cause of environmental
conservation. Also, the “Does” and “Says” parts (which are the observable traits in the
empathy map) also perfectly aligns with the user’s attitudes. Kavitha works actively towards
environmental protection and sustainability. Hence, we can conclude that user like Kavitha
has a persona type of showcasing both environment friendly attitude as well as behavior.

Abhishek’s Empathy Map

Like Kavitha, Abhishek’s thoughts, feelings and sayings reflects the need for action against
environmental damages. However, his doings tell a different story. Since energy efficient
products may usually be priced a little higher (due to higher costs incurred), Abhishek
sometimes compromises on the cause for environmental protection by selecting less energy
efficient products.
Hence, there is a contradiction when it comes to Abhishek’s behavior. In Design Thinking, its
important that we emphasize more on the actions of the users compared to their thoughts.
From this observation, we may place users like Abhishek under the persona type exhibiting
positive environmental attitude but negative environmental behavior.
Manish’s Empathy Map

Unlike Kavitha or Abhishek, it is clear that Manish does not believe that he as an individual
would make a big difference in the cause for environmental protection. He has an attitude
such that the rules and laws passed by the government will help improve the situation and the
individual simply has less control over it. A similar case is noticed in his behavior as well
(refer the “Does” quadrant).
Hence, from Manish’s empathy map, he can be included under the persona type exhibiting
negative environmental behavior as well as attitude.