Empathy Workshop

When starting a new project, an empathy workshop can generate an understanding of user needs within your team. It can help you understand who your customers or users are, clarify user needs, motivations and behaviours, and further build empathy between stakeholders and users.

Helping your team understand and prioritise user needs before designing a solution, can help ensure that a user-centred design is achieved.

Before

Who should be invited? Your core team members, key stakeholders and anyone with knowledge of the user research. If you can, also invite users (paying them for their time). Their insights and experiences are invaluable for the team to hear.

This type of workshop is usually informal, so you’ll ideally be an environment that encourages brainstorming. Bring flip charts, post its, pens, stickers; anything used for thinking creatively.

During

Some of the exercises you could use include #empathy mapping, #pain gain map, #role-playing. To gain the most from this type of workshop, prioritise hearing for your users, whether it’s directly in the workshop, or via your user researcher(s).

After

Shared, documented understanding of user needs, and, if time allows, a translation of how those apply to the project at hand.

 

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This is a part of a series of articles on different types of UX Workshops and what they are generally used for. Learn about the other types of UX workshops: Discovery workshop, Design, Prioritisation and Design Critique.

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