Empathy ?

First, it is important to know what empathy means:

Empathy:
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. (Oxford dictionaries)

Empathy is really important to understand our users. It is impossible to develop an efficient website without sharing users feelings.
We have to take into consideration their actions and reactions to improve our website and customer support.
Without empathy, it is difficult, for example, to efficiently interpret the results of a user test. It is important to get some distance with our own work to put ourselves in our users’ place.

So, it is necessary to understand our users feelings but it is also essential to take into account their own empathy.

Lush is a good example of company that uses its customers empathy.

They make handmade, cruelty-free, fair, ecological, fresh, ethical, organic (and even more) products.
These convictions touch customers and they want to participate to help them grow.

They make lots of campaigns to highlight their beliefs and they encourage the users to fight with them.

________________________

In this video, Lush shows how to make one of their flagship products: the Sleepy Body Lotion.

They highlight the composition of the lotion because of its fresh and organic ingredients.

They also specify the name of the compounder to show the importance assigned to the employees.

This campaign really uses the empathy of the customers and shows them they buy ethical, fresh and organic products, better for themselves and for the planet.

What is an Empathy Map ?

An empathy map helps us to understand users by interviewing and observing them.

It is very useful to identify our users needs and what they think about their experience on our website.

When we build a empathy map, we have to stay focused on the user feelings and behaviour.
For example, when the user repeats something several times because it should mean this information is important to take into consideration.
It is also important to translate the user feelings and body’s languages while staying neutral and attentively listening them.

Asking questions is another important part of this process.
It helps us to complete our empathy map discovering more information about our interlocutor.