An empathy map is a tool to help a design team to empathize with the people they are designing for. You can make an empathy map for a group of people or for a persona.

To be used after doing personas when more insights are needed.

MoSCoW is a method that allows the team to prioritize the different features that they will work on. Features are then categorized into “Must have”, “Should have”, “Could have”, or “Would like but won‘t get”.

To be used at the beginning of a timeslot (for example during Sprint planning) and when planning is needed.

An emotional journey is a visualization that maps and illustrates a user’s emotional experience through the experience of interacting with an organization, product or brand.

Backcasting is a method for planning the actions necessary to reach desired future goals. This method is often applied in a workshop format with stakeholders participating.

To be used when a future goal (even if it is vague) has been identified.

Instead of directly asking people what they like or don’t like about a particular brand, product or service, this method gives insight into their perceptions by eliciting feelings based on real-life experiences and interactions through writing a love or breakup letter.

To be used in the ideation and user exploration phase.

Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.

To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.

A problem tree is a tool to clarify the hierarchy of problems addressed by the team within a design project; it represents high level problems or related sublevel problems.

Brainwriting is essentially the same as brainstorming. Ideas are generated by asking people to write them down instead of verbally presenting them.

The lotus blossom method is a creativity exercise. It is a framework for idea generation, starting from one central theme. Eight conceptual themes grow out from the main theme and each of them are used as central theme to generate 8 more themes. Explore!

A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analyzing information and relationships.

Empathy in action is a way to help people empathize with, and understand a specific situation that is foreign to them.

To be used when you have collected enough data to understand a problem and need to let people unfamiliar with the problem empathize with it.

Following a similar structure of the Persona method, give your design personality by creating a design persona. This can be through visual design, copy, and interactions.

To be used when it is time to focus on product experience.