Empathise

Tools

Persona building exercise

Create a believable, “flesh and blood” person to represent your target audience. ​

Persona Canvas

Persona Canvas Questions PDF

Get To Know Canvas

Prompts to help you carry out research to test and validate your assumptions

Newcomer Empathy Exercise 1 PDF

Try this simple exercise to help a team build empathy with first-time visitors.

Newcomer Empathy Exercise 2 PDF

Try this more complex, 2-part exercise with a group to promote empathy with first-time visitors. Don't tell participants what the 2nd part of the activity is until they have completed the first.

Journey Mapping Canvas PDF

Use this tool to plot a "map" of the audience experience - what's good and bad about it, for all audiences or specific target groups.

Elsewhere on the web

Empathy as a keystone of ACED

Melting Pro's Antonia Silvaggi explains why and how empathy is the driver behind ACED. See her presentation by way of an introduction to Step 3.

Empathy: Dr Brenè Brown

A great, wise little talk on the difference between "empathy" and "sympathy".

How people drive strategy at Polo '900

Alessandro Bollo's presentation at the Adeste+ Summer School 2021 shows how the Polo '900 is organised to serve its diverse publics

Empathy on the Edge

Design gurus' Ideo on the deifining role of empathy in Design Thinking

Simple journey mapping

Simple introduction to this approach to understanding the whole experience

Advanced Journey Mapping

A more complex guide to plotting a journey map

Empathy Mapping Canvas

Dave Gray's update on Xtrane's useful empathy mapping tool, much repurposed and used in the cultural sector