Adding Delight using Empathy Map
A Practical Application for a Music Streaming App
When creating delightful products, it's crucial to deeply understand user emotions, behaviors, and motivations. Using the Delight Grid alongside an empathy map can help identify both functional and emotional opportunities, ensuring that features not only meet user needs but also evoke positive emotions. Below, we'll walk through how Zara's persona and empathy map insights can be transformed into Delight Grid inputs to craft more engaging and emotionally resonant features for a music streaming app.
Create a Persona with the Empathy Map
Research & Data Collection
We start by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from interviews, surveys, and usage analytics. In this case, we conducted user interviews with 15 people who regularly use music discovery apps. We’ve identified the most insightful patterns, focusing on their emotional triggers, pain points, and needs.
The empathy map is a common tool used in agile and design communities to visualize a user’s experience. It helps in expressing our understanding of a specific user by organizing user knowledge in one place. It can be used to categorize and understand research materials, identify gaps in knowledge, and develop personas, by combining the empathy maps of different users.
The general idea behind the empathy map is to walk awhile in your user’s shoes and use that opportunity to answer a series of questions:
What do our users hear?
What do our users do?
What do our users feel?
What do our users say?
The output of the exercise is a list of actions, feelings, and emotions you can use to segment your users into personas and understand the emotions at key points in their user journey. By capturing users’ pains, gains, and perceptions, an empathy map makes it easier to uncover functional and emotional motivators, the driving forces behind user behavior. This understanding is crucial for designing products that solve problems effectively, but also create meaningful, emotionally engaging experiences. A lack of information in the empathy map shows the need for more research.
Filling the Empathy Maps
I used empathy maps to picture users’ needs and visualize pain points. Let’s take the following example that could represent a segment of artists.
I start by gathering qualitative and quantitative data from interviews, surveys, and usage analytics. Usually, I conduct 10 to 20 user interviews with people who regularly used our products. I then identify the most insightful patterns, focusing on their emotional triggers, pain points, and needs.
Let’s take Zara, a hypothetical 25-year-old emerging musician, as an example. Based on the interviews, we can start populating the empathy map for her:
Empathy map breakdown for Zara:
What Zara Says
“I want to reach more people with my music, but it’s hard to stand out.”
“I prefer apps that recommend songs that are like the music I make.”
“I use multiple apps, but none of them really seem to get what I want to hear.”
Insights: Current platforms frustrate Zara and she feels they don’t cater to niche emerging artists like her. She’s actively seeking ways to grow her fanbase, and appreciates apps that help her discover music similar to her own work.
What Zara Thinks
“I think I would gain more followers if more people could hear my music.”
“If this app helps new artists like me get exposure, that’s worth my time.”
Insights: Zara is ambitious and believes in her potential to grow as an artist. She’s looking for platforms that will help her build an audience. She sees apps as tools for discovery, not just for herself as a listener, but as a musician trying to be heard.
What Zara Does
Zara spends about 2 to 3 hours a day browsing music apps such as SoundCloud, Spotify, and Bandcamp.
She frequently shares her music on social media, and tags platforms to get featured.
Zara explores new artists who have a smaller following, hoping for a mutual exchange of support.
Insights: Zara is proactive in engaging with platforms and social media. She regularly uses apps to listen, but also to self-promote. She’s heavily reliant on digital platforms for exposure.
What Zara Feels
“I’m anxious that my music won’t reach the right audience.”
“It’s exhausting to always be on the lookout for new ways to promote myself.”
“I feel proud when someone tells me they discovered me through a playlist.”
Insights: Zara experiences a lot of anxiety and pressure as an emerging artist. She’s passionate about what she creates, but feels unsure about how to get it in front of the right people. She craves validation from new listeners.
Collecting Motivators from Zara’s Empathy Map
Based on the collected insights, we can fill in the empathy map, then focus on identifying Zara’s functional motivators and emotional motivators. Here’s what we can define, based on the map up to this point.
Zara’s functional motivators:
Discover music similar to her own.
Promote her music to a broader audience.
Understand listener engagement with her tracks.
Use playlists as a tool for discovery.
Zara’s Emotional Motivators:
Feel validated as an artist.
Reduce anxiety about self-promotion.
Experience pride when listeners enjoy her music.
Feel connected to a supportive community.
Mapping Functional and Emotional Opportunities
Using the motivators collected from Zara's empathy map, we can now identify specific opportunities to enhance the user experience.
Functional Opportunities:
Curated Playlists for Emerging Artists
Solution: Create playlists that feature new and emerging artists, increasing their visibility.
Opportunity: Help Zara discover relevant music and promote her own tracks.
Listener Engagement Analytics
Solution: Provide insights on how users engage with Zara’s music (e.g., skips, repeats, shares).
Opportunity: Help Zara understand what resonates with her audience.
Personalized Music Recommendations
Solution: Tailor recommendations based on Zara’s preferences and genre.
Opportunity: Improve music discovery for Zara.
Emotional Opportunities:
Validation through Feedback
Solution: Allow listeners to leave comments or reactions on Zara’s tracks.
Opportunity: Provide emotional validation and reduce her anxiety.
Recognition Features
Solution: Highlight Zara’s music in “Artist of the Week” or similar features.
Opportunity: Boost Zara’s confidence and pride.
Community Building Tools
Solution: Introduce a feature where artists can connect and collaborate with each other.
Opportunity: Create a sense of belonging and reduce the isolation Zara feels.
Building the Delight Grid
The Delight Grid categorizes solutions based on whether they address functional, emotional, or both types of needs. Our goal is to generate solutions that allow solving for both functional and emotional motivators. We call these Deep Delight.
Deep Delight Solutions are those that solve both functional and emotional needs. For instance:
Curated Playlists with Listener Reactions: Not only helps Zara discover relevant music but also allows her to see real-time reactions from listeners, creating a more engaging and validating experience.
Engagement Analytics with Personal Messages: Provides valuable insights on user engagement while offering personalized messages from listeners, enhancing emotional connection.
Collaborative Playlists for Emerging Artists: Encourages community building by allowing artists to collaborate on playlists, fostering mutual support and recognition.
Applying the Delight Grid to Product Decisions
Based on Zara's persona, prioritizing deep delight solutions will ensure that the app not only meets her practical needs but also makes her feel seen, valued, and connected.
With the Delight Grid in place, product teams can:
Identify Gaps: See which areas are lacking emotional engagement and brainstorm ways to enhance existing features.
Track Progress: Use the grid to monitor how solutions evolve over time and whether they move from low delight to deep delight.
Foster Innovation: Encourage teams to think beyond functional requirements and consider how to create memorable and emotionally engaging user experiences.
When prioritizing features for the roadmap, it's essential to balance low, surface, and deep delight solutions:
Low Delight: Solutions that solve well-defined technical challenges but may lack emotional engagement (e.g., basic playlist creation tools).
Surface Delight: Features that add a human touch, such as personalized messages or seasonal themes.
Deep Delight: Solutions that combine functional efficiency with emotional resonance, creating lasting impact.
Conclusion
By combining empathy mapping with the Delight Grid, we’ve transformed Zara's persona into actionable product insights. This empathy-driven approach ensures that our music streaming app delivers both functional value and emotional connection, increasing the likelihood of creating a loyal and engaged user base. Ultimately, delight is about creating products that people love, not just use, and Zara’s journey highlights the power of understanding users at a deeper level to achieve this goal.
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