In February 2020, I attended Getting Started with Design Sprints hosted by Design Sprints London. Being new to design and UX, I was excited to get down to business and learn a new way of tackling a problem. Alongside their presentation, we actually had the opportunity to break out into groups and work through aspects of a design sprint.
First, we were presented with the problem. In this case, it was a man trying to figure out what present to buy for a friend. We watched an interview with a user who explained his journey, thoughts, and feelings around gift-giving. We then broke into groups and completed an empathy map. I’d never done one of these before but it was pretty intuitive. It’s a tool that essentially helps the researcher organise the participant’s thoughts and feelings and to better understand their pains and gains. In social work, I completed similar mapping exercises with my team.
After completing the empathy map, we began plotting our insights on a customer journey map. By combining these two visualisation techniques, we were able to better understand how our user was feeling and what they were thinking throughout their journey of purchasing a gift for their friend.
Unfortunately, we ran out of time and weren’t able to continue onto ideation. It was exciting to get a glimpse of the design sprint process and try out new techniques. I look forward to using empathy maps to better understand users. It’s a great tool to help organise their thoughts and feelings into tangible insights.
