Can we create Empathy Map without creating Persona?

Question

I am new to this UX industry. I have a task with a brief to create an Audiobook app experience & to map out and simply describe what will be your end-to-end design process to tackle this problem.

As of now I am not able to find out Prospective users to interview for this concept so , I'm thinking that I can create Empathy map by visualising as a User & move forward with User flow diagram.

So here are 2 questions:

1. What's the best creating combination of Artefacts to describe End-to-end design process ? Like , Problem statement, Solution , Empathy map , user flow diagram , IA etc ?
2. Can I directly create Empathy map without creating Persona ?

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

I believe you are in the right track by visualising a user and to move forward with a User Flow diagram. In my opinion, Nielson Norman (see https://www.nngroup.com/) is a good reference/source to look for what designs are best for what applications.

UX design always revolve around the user. You need to identify who the target user is first. With this said,

1. There is no best combination of artefacts to describe end-to-end design process, it's more about suitability. You should first understand what the application does, how users (or assumed user in your case) behave and then decide what methods and tools you can to use design the process.
2. You need a user persona to create an empathy map. (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping/)

You may not have a person to interview to begin with, or even not knowing what the problem is. Sometimes we have a solution seeking a problem to solve, this is ok. But you have to assume who the target user is and walkthrough the experience of that target user. After which, you can then with the results obtained, to see if you need to tweak the user persona in order to make it more real and close to real life, or to tweak your solution (i.e. UI design) to make a better experience for users.

Hope this helps!