“Who are we designing for?” is a key question in product design. It’s impossible to create a successful product without knowing who will be using it. Empathy map, user persona and user flow are the most useful tool that allow you to understand your target audience and how they interact with your product.

Empathy map

Developing a strong sense of empathy can help you truly understand your users’ needs, wants, fears, and desires. An empathy map is a tool that can help you build empathy with your target users by helping you to understand and visualize what you know about them.

Empathy map is a canvas divided into several sections with the user in the center. The canvas describes what the user is saying, thinking, doing and feeling while using your product.

How to design and use an empathy map

Here is a quick video that covers how to design an empathy map.

User persona

User personas are fictional characters representing a group of users that might use your product similarly. Well-designed persona has an opportunity to become a user archetype that product teams use to assess their design decisions.

User personas help uncover the different ways people interact with your product. Product creators can use this information to improve the user experience for real use cases.

How to design and use user persona

Here is a quick video that covers how to design a user persona.

User flow

User flow is a series of actions a user takes to achieve a particular goal. User flow diagrams typically showcase how users go through a product step by step. User flow is an excellent tool you can use to communicate design from the perspective of your users.

User flows are helpful when a product team works on information architecture. User flow helps the team to structure and prioritize information in the system to help the users comprehend it. User flows can also be very helpful for evaluating user interfaces. The team can use this tool during design review sessions. User flow can help the team answer the questions such as “Is this interaction clear to the user?”

How to design and use user flow

Here is a quick video that covers how to design user flow.

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