Designing Personas with Empathy Map

A software product’s acceptance depends on the user experience that it provides to its users. The software product must meet the user needs, and one way to understand those needs is through creation of Personas. The Personas technique allows describing the users’ characteristics, goals and skills. The Empathy Map (EM) method can be used to describe personas. The EM’s goal is to create a degree of empathy with the user so the product developing team starts to understand more deeply the users and become more aware of their real needs. To assess the EM effects on the creation of personas, we conducted a feasibility study with 20 subjects. Initially, the subjects learned how to describe personas in textual form. After that, they applied the EM to create personas. After using the EM, the subjects answered a questionnaire about their perceptions regarding the EM’s ease of use and its usefulness. The results showed that majority of subjects considered EM useful and easy to create personas. Furthermore, this majority also said that they would use the EM for the creation of personas again. KeywordsPersona; Empathy Map; User Experience; UX.