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The empathy mapping stage began by conducting extensive research, interviews, surveys, and observation of potential users featured as our interview participants. This allowed the design team to gather insights and identify key user groups within the NFT marketplace ecosystem, such as artists, collectors, and investors. this added to the persona evaluation derived mainly from our survey data enabled us to know our target audience.
Based on the research findings, the team created empathy maps, which visually represented the users' perspectives. These maps consisted of four quadrants: 'Says,' 'Thinks,' 'Feels,' and 'Does.' Each quadrant provided valuable information about the users' behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and stated needs.
In the 'Says' quadrant, the team documented the explicit statements and feedback from users during interviews and surveys. This helped to identify their expressed needs and concerns regarding the NFT marketplace.
The 'Thinks' quadrant focused on capturing users' thoughts and assumptions, delving into their beliefs, expectations, and motivations when engaging with NFTs. Understanding their mindset and mental models allowed the team to design features and functionalities that aligned with users' expectations.
The 'Feels' quadrant explored users' emotional responses and experiences. By empathizing with their feelings, such as excitement, frustration, or trust, the design team gained insights into how to create a positive emotional connection and a delightful user experience within the marketplace.
Lastly, the 'Does' quadrant provided information about users’ actions and behaviors related to NFTs. By observing their actions, both within and outside the marketplace, the team identified pain points, barriers, and opportunities for improvement.
Overall, the empathy mapping stage in the NFT marketplace design project played a crucial role in uncovering user needs, motivations, and emotional triggers. It enabled the design team to develop a deep understanding of the target audience and informed the creation of user-centered features and functionalities.
For more on our project Whiteboard, click the link below:
https://www.figma.com/embed?embed_host=notion&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.figma.com%2Ffile%2FkPy8aThALBJChKYgSMi0qC%2FNexta-Whiteboard%3Ftype%3Dwhiteboard%26node-id%3D0%3A1%26t%3Dgle54kLiRV5AwyOF-1
From the empathy map, the team outlined the user pain points and used it as a point for reference for brainstorming
Ideas generated from the competitive insights and journey map improvement points were first highlighted on the brainstorming section of the whiteboard to avoid oversight. All the team members were tasked with generating new ideas related to the pain points, without worrying about the feasibility or practicality of each idea. The goal of this phase was to come up with as many ideas as possible, and then later evaluate and refine them. Brainstorming is an important part of the ideation phase, as it helps to generate a wide range of potential solutions and approaches to the problem at hand.
The Idea matrix was employed to help filter out the many ideas and insights gained based on factors such as risk-reward impact-effort, and business implementation constraints (reference to business strategy). Our remote team encountered certain communication constraints with the sorting method employed for idea prioritization and decided to move the process into a Stand-up which ran for 2 hours. Another factor that affected the final cause of the meet was the target audience and actors at play which affected our business stratification such as the working system of smart contracts in blockchain and its limitations