Empathy is a key quality when it comes to understand your customers at the deepest level, make better collaborations and design meaningful products.

Empathy is an essential attribute in every business to discover needs and desires of end-users, but also to work effectively with other team members (Product owners, developers and other stakeholders). It also requires empathy to inspire your team to become more user-centric.

You must understand where the user is coming from in a cultural and social point of view. If certain things just don't make sense to you, continue your research and ask questions to your user and to people who are in contact with them.

With these insights, you can build or improve your product on what they already know of your business and their ability to figure things out in a very logical and rational way. The goal is to gather insights from users and effectively communicate those into actionable items.

There are many useful frameworks and templates available, and there's no one perfect way to develop user understanding. They should be the result of constant, thoughtful, and collaborative research. They reflect real users and should be constantly revised. People may change their goals and needs over time, and it's important to keep an eye on those changes, otherwise products may become obsolete:

• Try to revise your data and your assumptions on a regular basis.
• Use editable frameworks so that the whole design/product team can contribute once they discover something new about users.
• Make up-to-date frameworks constantly accessible to the team.

These workshops can help you stay focused on empathy all along your works and gives you a concrete path to ensure your vision is built on empathy for a greater positive impact.
Inspired by workshops from CPS, Design Thinking or the field of qualitative studies, these templates will enable you to better know your users.