UX Design - Task 2 / User Personas & Empathy Map

16.5.2025 - 30.5.2025 (Week 4 - Week 5)
Chong Hui Yi / 0363195
UX Design / BDCM
Task 2 / User Personas and Empathy Map

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TABLE OF CONTENT

1. Lectures

2. Instructions

3. Task 2

4. Feedback

5. Reflection

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LECTURES

Click HERE to view the lectures

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INSTRUCTIONS

<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EYvr1G06s6Om4qImGGAXBcnukOjhsgEv/preview" width="640" height="480" allow="autoplay"></iframe>

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Task 2: User Personas & Empathy Map

Instruction

"Students will synthesize the user interviews in group to draw several user personas. The user personas will be presented in User Empathy Map, and the process will lead to User Journey Map to document the journey of the targeted users in various touch points in next step. They need to define the target group to conduct the UX research process.

The process of User Empathy Map and User Journey Map are composed of several tasks and User-centred Design (UCD) processes that will be discussed in class.

Students are required to prepare a comprehensive output of the User Personas and User Empathy Map derived from group user interview synthesis according to the topic/problem statement chosen."

Progression

We had actually started part of the user interview group synthesis during Task 1, but at the time, not all group members had completed their interview analyses. Therefore, we continued the synthesis process in this task.

We began by writing down key points from each interview on individual sticky notes (Fig. 1.0), and then categorised them to form our initial affinity diagram (Fig. 1.1). Dr Wong gave us feedback that simply stating the percentage of participants was unclear, as it did not indicate the actual number of interviewees. To improve clarity, we updated our summary to reflect the exact number of participants.

Additionally, we realised that our interviewees were only students and alumni, so we later updated the colour labels on the sticky notes to reflect this more accurately.

Fig. 1.0 Interview Data Summary

Fig. 1.1 Initial Affinity Diagram

Fig. 1.2 Final Affinity Diagram

Next, we divided the work among the team:

- Hui Yi (myself): Student Empathy Map & Persona

- Iman: Alumni Empathy Map & Persona

I began by filling in the empathy map template (Fig. 2.0), answering the guiding questions to create an initial empathy map for the student user. This helped me better understand their needs and pain points, and laid the groundwork for developing a more accurate and relevant user persona.

Fig. 2.0 Initial User Empathy Map - student

I then simplified and refined the initial empathy map to highlight the key insights, which is shown in Fig. 2.1 – the left side represents the version I worked on, while the right side was completed by Iman.

Fig. 2.1 User Empathy Map - Student & Alumni

Based on our empathy maps, we also developed corresponding user personas to guide our design decisions moving forward. These personas helped us align our solutions more closely with real user behaviours and expectations.

Fig. 2.2 User Persona - Student & Alumni

Final Outcome

FigJam Link: https://www.figma.com/board/bDfj1mE15nkc6N6EgcujFG/CrowdFree---UX-Design?node-id=0-1&t=U8qyIcoCaKxMRSJc-1

Fig. 3.0 CrowdFree Presentation slide - PDF

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FEEDBACK

Week 6:

• Avoid using only percentages in the affinity diagram.
• Indicate the exact number of interviewees for each point.
• Make data representation in the affinity diagram clearer and more specific.

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REFLECTION

I was really glad to complete this task. Although we were supposed to create three user personas, we only had two in the end—one for students and one for alumni—because those were the only user types we interviewed. This made me realise that user personas are very closely tied to the research. Even though the personas are fictional, their pain points and needs are directly drawn from real interview data.

To be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy creating empathy maps or personas, but I understand that they are an essential part of the UX process. They help translate raw data into something more human and relatable, which is important for guiding our design decisions.

One of our team members wasn’t able to contribute much to this task due to personal reasons, but thankfully, the task itself wasn’t too difficult, and Iman and I were able to manage.