A Novel AI Approach for the Systematic Creation of Empathy Maps

Abstract

The utilization of Empathy Maps in User Experience and Design Thinking is becoming commonplace. They can be seen as a valuable tool to help developers better understand the user’s requirements. During the interaction design, it is essential to have a thorough knowledge of what the user wants, which might be difficult to gather or portray to others. In this sense, Empathy Maps visually represent the user’s information, attitude, and behavior. Nevertheless, creating Empathy Maps can become tedious, as this usually requires the involvement of a group of people with expert knowledge, deeply analyzing the information elicited from the user. This is the reason why most Empathy Maps are created manually. A first literature analysis reports that there are still no specific tools to generate Empathy Maps automatically, although there are technologies to take on this challenge. In this paper, we present a tool for automatically generating an initial version of an Empathy Map that can help speed up the capture of explicit knowledge, and then it can be further worked on by the development team. The tool creates the Empathy Map from an audio interview, featuring audio transcription technology and natural language processing. More specifically, this paper includes the architecture, a proof of concept, and user testing, reporting numerical evidence and promising results to corroborate the proposal’s feasibility, reaching an overall accuracy of 86% at classification.

Keywords:

• Human-computer interaction
• empathy map
• usability
• user experience
• design thinking
• intelligent user interfaces

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Spanish Research Agency under grant numbers TED2021-129381B-C21 and PID2021-122270OB-I00.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta Higuera

Marta Higuera received her B.Cs. in 2023 from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is interested in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence, developing specific solutions and tools that help evaluators efficiently conduct usability assessments.

José A. Macías

José A. Macías received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he currently works as Associate Professor. He works on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since 1998, participating in the steering committee of different HCI associations such as AIPO or the Spanish ACM-SIGCHI.