Workshop Exercises: Understand
Behavioral Empathy Mapping
Understand user and customer motivations behaviorally
Why: Understand users’ psychological motivations and contexts by building a richer view of the user.
When: Use to establish an understanding of the users for which your product aims to change or influence behaviors.
Standard Empathy Mapping already includes what people think and feel as well as what they say and do. This adaptation adds behavioral prompts, such as EAST, to help a team examine possible barriers and enablers. It does not reveal unspoken or unconscious processes directly: distinguish research evidence, participant self-reports and interpretations throughout.
Use the framework to generate questions about the context in which behavior occurs. An apparent barrier or emotional trigger remains a hypothesis until appropriate research supports it. A completed canvas does not establish that a particular bias caused an action or that a proposed intervention will work.
Choose one important uncertainty, investigate it with users and test a proposed change before treating it as an effective intervention. Keep the user’s own goal visible when deciding what behavior to support.
Instructions for running this play
- Define target behavior. Start by defining the target behavior you aim to understand or influence. This provides context for the evidence you will later classify.
- Draw Empathy Map
On a large surface, draw quadrants representing different dimensions of user experience, such as Behaviors, Thinking/Saying, and Feeling, and write the user goal in the middle.
- List key observations
Conduct a 10-minute individual Silent Storming exercise, asking participants to write down key observations about the user on separate sticky notes and let them place them on the surface. Discuss the results collectively. - Classify observations listed on the canvas in categories (here, using the EAST framework) using a marker, dot sticker, or similar mechanism:
- Easy – things that the user could benefit from being easier to do.
- Attractive – things that the user either doesn’t notice or does not think much of.
- Social – things that could have or lack a social aspect.
- Timely – things that the user will only engage in or act on if the timing is precise.
- Map barriers and enablers
Identify and map barriers and enablers for each observation. - Ideate solutions
Based on identified barriers, enablers explore relevant persuasive patterns to ideate psychology-informed design solutions. - Write** How Might We… **questions for the insights with the most critical barriers and promising enablers, using the Persuasive Patterns card deck to suggest solutions.
Tips to perfect this play
Master and adapt the play to fit your context and needs.
Tip: Extend workshop with behavioral framework
Common frameworks used are COM-B, MINDSPACE, or EAST (as described in this version of the exercise).
Tip: Extend interviews with a behavioral lense
Consider extending not only the workshop, but also the interviews providing data for the workshop with behavioral models to understand what is driving the "doing" part.
Every card deck includes workshop patterns, so your team can put the methods to work in your next session.
Running behavioral design workshops? The Persuasive Patterns Workshop Playbook (PDF) shows you how to design and run them.
Browse the card decks- Three Creativity Challenges from IDEO’s Leaders by Dave Gray
- UX Research: Empathy Mapping and Proto-Personas by Sara Fortier