Gamestorming: Empathy Map

The following excerpt from Gamestorming explains the rules of Empathy Map, one of the 83 different games included in the book that introduce game mechanics and creativity to the cutting-edge work environment.

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Object of Play

The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profle.

Number of Players

3–10

Duration of Play

10–15 minutes

How to Play

Personas help focus a group’s attention on the people involved in a project—often the customer or end user. Although creating an empathy map is not the rigorous, research-based process that is required for developing personas, it can quickly get a group to focus on the most important element: people.

In this exercise, you will be creating a study of a person with the group. Start by drawing a large circle that will accommodate writing inside. Add eyes and ears to make it into a large “head.”

• Ask the group to give this person a name.
  
  
• Label large areas around the head: “Tinking”, “Seeing”, “Hearing”, and “Feeling”.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Ask the group to describe—from this person’s point of view—what this person’s experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling.
  
  
• The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?

Strategy

The group should feel comfortable “checking” each other by referring back to the empathy map. When this happens, it will sound like “What would so-and-so think?” It’s good to keep the empathy map up and visible during the course of the work to be used as this kind of focusing device.

The Empathy Map game was developed by Scott Matthews of XPLANE.