Design Thinking:

Empathy
Enterprise & Entrepreneurship
Lecture 3
Content
• Design Thinking Recap
• Empathy
• Empathy Maps
• Personas
• Needs Wants Demands
• Summary
Design Thinking (Recap)
• Throughout history, good designers have
applied a human-centric creative process to
build meaningful and effective solutions.
• Despite these (and other) early examples of
human-centric products, design has
historically been an afterthought in the
business world, applied only to touch up a
product’s aesthetics.
• This resulted in companies/entrepreneurs
creating solutions which fail to meet their
customers’ real needs.
Design Thinking (Recap)
• As an entrepreneur, it is crucial to understand
the market and learn whether your product or
service will be helpful to the customers or not.
You must consider the customer’s needs and
design your brand accordingly.
• The design thinking ideology asserts that a
hands-on, user-centric approach to problem
solving can lead to innovation, differentiation
and a competitive advantage. This hands-on,
user-centric approach is defined by the design
thinking process and comprises 5 distinct
phases.
Design Thinking Process (Recap)
Design Thinking Process (Recap)
• Empathize: Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users
do, say, think, and feel.
• Define: Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. In
pinpointing your users’ needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.
• Ideate: Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs
identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is
too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.
• Prototype: Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this
phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this
phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on
your prototypes.
• Test: Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’
needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?
Empathy – First Stage
• Empathy is the first stage of design thinking and is at the core of human-centred
design. This step in design thinking forces an orientation around the people, their
goals, objectives and pain points.
• The aim is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to
solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern
through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their
experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical
environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues
involved.
• Empathy is crucial to a human-centred design process such as design thinking,
and empathy allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the
world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.
Empathy
• Using an empathy map can help uncover how people feel, what they say, what
they do and what they think.
• Its intent is to uncover insights about how people make decisions and what’s
important to them.
• Successful entrepreneurs obsess over understanding the user, the problems they
are trying to solve or the opportunities to address their unmet needs.
• A significant amount of information is gathered at this stage to use during the
next stage and to develop the best possible understanding of the users, their
needs, and the problems that underlie the development of that particular
product.
Empathy Mapping
• An empathy map is a collaborative tool used to
visualise what we know about a particular type
of user/persona. It conveys knowledge about
users in order to
• Create a shared understanding of user needs.
• Facilitate decision making.
• Empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants
(Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or
persona in the middle.
• Empathy maps seek to provide a glance into
who a user is as a whole.
Empathy Map

Create a sample empathy map

here

Freehand Digital product design,

workflow, & collaboration |
InVision (invisionapp.com)
Empathy Map Quadrants
• Says: Contains what the user says out loud during an interview or usability
study.
• Thinks: Captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience of using
the product.
• Ask (What occupies the user’s thoughts? What matters to the user?)
• Does: This quadrant encloses the actions the user takes.
• Ask (What does the user physically do? How does the user go about doing
it?)
• Feels: This quadrant is the user’s emotional state
• Ask (What does the user get excited about? How does the user feel about
the experience)
Why Use Empathy Maps
• Capture who a user or persona is. The empathy-
mapping process helps categorize your knowledge of
the user into one place. It can be used to:
• Categorize and make sense of qualitative research
• Discover gaps in your current knowledge
• Create personas by aligning and grouping
empathy maps covering individual users
• Communicate a user or persona to others: An
empathy map is a quick, digestible way to illustrate
user attitudes and behaviours.
Personas – What is a Persona?
• Personas are fictional characters, which you create
based upon your research in order to represent the
different user types that might use your service,
product, site, or brand in a similar way.
• Creating personas will help you to understand your
users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals.
• Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It
can help you to recognise that different people have
different needs and expectations, and it can also help
you to identify with the user you’re designing for.
• Personas make the design task at hand less complex,
they guide your ideation processes, and they can help
you to achieve the goal of creating a better product
Sample Persona

Create a sample
persona here
User Persona Templa
te and Examples |
Xtensio
What Does a Persona Contain?
• User personas or marketing personas come in different styles and sizes. What
to include in your persona is whatever is helpful to your organisation. (e.g., a
tech company would be interested in how many electronic gadgets you own
while a show company would be interested in how many times you go out.
• However, there are some specifics that are useful for every industry, and
provide the backbone of an effective persona.

• Name • Personality traits

• Photo • Motivations
• Personal quote/motto • Goals and Frustrations
• Bio • Preferred brands and influencers,
• Demographics • etc.
Needs, Wants & Demands
• Human needs are states of felt deprivation. They include basic physical
needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety; social needs for belonging
and affection; and individual needs for knowledge and self-expression.
Needs are a basic part of the human makeup.
• Wants are the form human needs take as they are shaped by culture
and individual personality. An American needs food but wants a Big
Mac, fries, and a soft drink. A British, needs food but wants fish and
chips. Wants are shaped by one’s society and are described in terms of
objects that will satisfy those needs.
• When backed by buying power, wants become demands. Given their
wants and resources, people demand products and services with
benefits that add up to the most value and satisfaction.
Needs, Wants & Demands

Needs Wants

Demands
Needs – A felt state of Wants – The form human Demands – Wants backed
deprivation. needs take. by buying power.
 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• People have five sets of
needs which come in a
particular order.
• As each level of needs
is satisfied, the desire
to fulfil the next set
kicks in.
• We seek to satisfy the
needs in lower levels
before those in higher
levels
Needs, Wants, Demands (Activity)
• Think of a need on the hierarchy of need.
• Think of a way you would like to satisfy
this need (want)
• Which products and services would you
demand to satisfy this need that will give
you the most value?
Summary
• The design thinking asserts that a hands-on, user-centric
approach to problem solving can lead to innovation,
differentiation and a competitive advantage.
• Empathy is the first stage of design thinking and forces an
orientation around the people, their goals, objectives and pain
points.
• Creating personas will help you to understand your users’
needs, experiences, behaviours and goals.
• Needs are a felt state of deprivation wants are the form human
needs take and demands are wants backed by buying power.
Questions?