Getting to Know Personas & Empathy Maps

Happy Friday! Hopefully, on this blessed day, this article can bring some value to you 🙂

Previously, I got this material from a training session, and it would be a shame not to share it.

Personas and empathy maps are part of the customer journey mapping process. Why is it important for a UX researcher or UX designer to understand these?

From my personal perspective—as someone who is still relatively new and gaining experience—I believe it’s essential to understand them because they are incredibly useful during the user research process.

A persona is like a CV or resume of the user, while an empathy map illustrates different aspects of that persona and their experiences within a given scenario. This empathy map then becomes a foundational element for building a customer journey map.

To be honest, I used to feel confused when conducting user research. I typically relied only on the classic 5W + 1H questions. But now, my work feels much easier with personas and empathy maps. It turns out there are structured ways to improve the user research process—leading to more accurate and meaningful data.

Let’s get to know them more deeply 🙂

Personas

You can see an example of a persona here:

A persona itself consists of various types of information, including:

1. 1. Personality
   This consists of four key pillars and can be defined after conducting user research. It’s important to note that this section is filled in by us (the UX team), not by the user. The essence of personas is that they are created by UX professionals, not the users themselves.2.

2. User Information
This includes details such as age, status, location, occupation, and three words that describe the user.

3. Motivations
What drives or motivates the user.

4. Goals
The purpose of why the user uses the application or website. In my opinion, this is the most important part, because it helps us further identify the problems and determine what kind of solutions we can offer to stakeholders or clients.

5. Frustrations
As the title suggests, this section highlights the challenges or pain points the user faces when using the application, interacting with a feature, or dealing with a specific scenario.

6. Bio
This section is slightly different from a typical “bio” — it focuses more on the user’s habits and behavior.
For example, let’s say we have a user named Paijo, a 40-year-old doctor, and the app we’re analyzing is Jualo. His bio might look something like this: “Paijo is a doctor who deeply loves his family and is also an antique collector. In between his busy schedule, he uses his Samsung Galaxy S5 to browse for antique items on Jualo. He typically uses the app for both buying and selling. He usually opens the app during his lunch break at 12:15 PM, during breakfast at 7:00 AM, and at night before going to bed around 10:00 PM. On weekends, he rarely opens the Jualo app, as he is more focused on replying to potential buyers via SMS or WhatsApp.”

7. Technology & Brand

Emphaty Map

In the thinking phase, we need to consider several key questions such as: what truly matters? what does the user think? what do they want?

In seeing and hearing:
How does the user behave, present themselves, and interact with others?

In feeling:
What does the user truly feel? What excites them the most? What are their worries and aspirations?

In doing:
What actions does the user take to achieve their goals? In this section, we need to carefully observe the user (either directly or indirectly), step by step. For example, in a login process—what does the user do first, and what do they ultimately end up doing?

For a complete overview, you can refer to the illustration above.

Hope this is helpful 🙂

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User Experience Design Agency – Hoomix

We are UX Agency based in Bandung- Indonesia. We help startup for MVP and company to fixed problem and growth

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