Stakeholder Mapping

Every project decision you make should take your stakeholders into account. Your team will make better decisions if they’re based on a consensus about which stakeholders are your highest priorities, and why.

This is a team sport. Give yourselves 60 minutes.

1. Using the Ideation card, generate a list of stakeholders. When you think about your project, ask the question, “Who cares?” Those are your stakeholders, whether they’re inside your organization, on your client list, in the local community or beyond. You don’t need names. Jot down their roles or titles, perhaps with the organizations they represent.
2. Now, map your stakeholders onto a Power/Interest matrix. To draw the matrix, divide the page into four equal quadrants with a horizontal axis, Interest, and a vertical axis, Power. Label the ends of each axis High and Low.
3. Assign each of your stakeholders to one quadrant of the matrix, according to how much power they have to change the outcome and how much interest they have in the success of the outcome. As a general rule, someone with high power can say “yes” or “no” to some aspect of the project, someone with high interest cares a lot about and will be affected by the outcome.

High-Power High-Interest stakeholders are important to engage across the project. You should establish strong lines of communication with High-Power Low-Interest Stakeholders, and ensure that the opinions of Low-Power High-Interest stakeholders are considered in decision-making about the project.

Asking Questions

Whether you are soliciting input through interviews, surveys, discussions, or mindreading, the quality of your questions determines the quality of your data.

1. Identify what you want to know, and what you want to do with that information.
2. Use the Ideation Card to generate lots of possible questions.
3. Find the most promising questions by looking at how well each aligns with your goals.
4. Test your questions with a variety of people. Were your respondents confused or uncomfortable? Do their answers produce the information you want?
5. Revise your questions and test them with new people.

Closed questions ask people to rank or rate options, choose from predetermined options, or enter a numeric answer. Use them to collect facts, support an existing conclusion or prioritize set of known options. They generate quantitative data that often translates well into graphs or charts. They’re quick to answer and simple to analyze.

Open-ended questions ask people to explain their experiences, offer an opinion or contribute ideas. Use them to seek new information and insights, to understand cause and effect, and to explore uncharted territory. Open-ended questions require more commitment from respondents and more analysis from the researcher, but they generate compelling stories and rich insights.

• Keep questions brief, but provide any background people need to know in order to answer.
• Ask respondents about their own thoughts, beliefs and experiences. Don’t invite or expect respondents to speak for other people.
• Don’t give the reader any reason to believe you prefer one answer over another, or prime their responses by providing examples they might parrot back to you.
• Avoid words with multiple meanings, and subjective response options such as “regularly” or “a lot.”
• Keep your language gender-neutral, objective, and inclusive. Would your questions be equally friendly and relevant regardless of the respondent’s age, race, culture, faith, income, ability, marital status, sexual preference, language, or literacy? Particularly when you’re exploring a sensitive topic or a community outside your lived experience, ask experts and community members to review your wording.
• Unless you need to pre-screen participants, save the demographic questions for last. In numeric questions, ask people to select a range. People would rather give an age range (e.g., 45-55 years) than disclose their exact age, and a household income range than their take-home pay. Let people opt out of questions.
• Always finish with something open- ended like “Is there anything you’d like to add?”

Empathy Map

Empathy map

Who does your project serve or affect? Create empathy maps about hypothetical users or customers to focus on their experience of the project.

This sport can be played solo or with a team. You need a big sheet of paper and a marker. Allow yourselves 30 minutes for each empathy map.

1. Draw a cartoon face in the middle of the page and draw lines radiating out from the face to divide the page into six areas. Label the areas: Seeing, Saying, Doing, Thinking, Hearing, Feeling
2. Choose a name, gender and age for this person. Do they have a job, a family or something else distinctive about their daily life? Jot these down on the edge of the map.
3. Put yourself in that person’s shoes and think about their experience of your project. When they approach it, what are they seeing? Saying? Answer all six questions on the map in as much detail as you can imagine.
4. After you’ve drawn your empathy map, list three things that person wants, and three obstacles to those desires.

You may have developed personas before. An empathy map is similar to personas, but you spend less time describing traits of the hypothetical users, and more time digging into how the project looks and feels from their viewpoint... and what you can extrapolate about their wants and needs.

Developing empathy maps for varied and contrasting hypothetical users can really round out your understanding of user experience. When you can, invite real live stakeholders to complete first-person empathy maps!

Developing and consulting an empathy map helps your team to consider the many forces around your users and customers that affect their experiences. Post the empathy maps where the team can see them daily. Check in from time to time: How would this feature of the project look to “Karen”? What would “Kareem” say about this change? What else will “Karl” be doing when he uses this?

Feedback Grid

Gathering feedback from stakeholders and group members can be quick and constructive.

This is an individual sport that can be played by several contributors in parallel. It takes very little prep. Draw a grid in advance, or invite contributors to draw their own on an ordinary piece of paper. Sticky notes are optional. Allow 10 minutes.

1. Ask each contributor to draw a two-by-two grid that fills the page, and label the quadrants:
   • Upper left—“What I like about this idea”
   • Upper right—“What I would improve”
   • Lower left—“What questions I still have”
   • Lower right—“What new ideas this gives me”
2. Give everyone 10 minutes to jot down their notes in the appropriate quadrants. Optional: If you ask folks to use sticky notes instead of writing directly on the feedback grid, you can cluster the feedback later to spot themes that suggest criteria for evaluating this and other ideas.