CX Game · Personas

Empathy Mapping Exercise

This interactive game challenges participants to create detailed empathy maps that help them understand and connect with diverse customer personas. Through engaging activities, teams visualize and discuss customers' thoughts, feelings, actions, and motivations.

Run this with your team All games

Participants

2-8

Facilitators

Seniority

Any

Level

Easy

Learning Objective

Teams build detailed empathy maps for distinct customer personas, deepening their ability to design from the customer's thoughts, feelings, actions and motivations.

How to Play

Setup

Assign each team a persona grounded in real research or data.
Provide an empathy-map canvas: Says, Thinks, Does, Feels, plus Pains and Gains.
Supply quotes, support tickets or interview snippets as evidence.

Rules of play

Teams populate each quadrant using evidence, flagging anything that is a guess.
Contradictions between what the persona says and does must be explicitly captured.
Teams translate the map into one design implication per quadrant.
Maps are shared so the room can challenge stereotypes and assumptions.

Debrief

Where did 'says' and 'does' diverge, and what does that gap tell you?
Which assumptions did you smuggle in without evidence?
How would this empathy map change a decision you are currently making?

CX Principle Reinforced

Empathy maps move teams beyond demographics to the lived experience of the customer — what they feel and fear, not just who they are on a form.

The most valuable insight usually sits in the gap between what customers say and what they actually do; surfacing that tension is where genuine design opportunities hide.

Format

Participants: 2-8
Facilitators: 1
Seniority: Any
Level: Easy

CX Games

Other games

Behavioral

Anchoring Effect Experiment

The Anchoring Effect Experiment is a hands-on workshop where teams explore the anchoring effect and its impact on decision-making and pricing strategies. By setting a baseline (anchor) and observing how it influences subsequent decisions, participants gain insights into how anchoring can affect customer perceptions and behavior.

Behavioral Bias Bingo

Behavioral Bias Bingo is a fun and educational game where participants identify common behavioral biases in customer interactions and strategize ways to address them using insights from the "Rebel Unravel" deck. By recognizing and understanding biases, teams can enhance customer experience and decision-making processes.

Bias Bingo

Spot cognitive biases in real customer scenarios — first to a line wins.

Bias Breakdown

A card game where teams use the "Rebel Unravel" deck to identify and overcome behavioral biases impacting customer decisions and experiences.

Brand Advocacy Role Play

Brand Advocacy Role Play is a game where teams simulate scenarios to convert neutral customers into enthusiastic brand advocates. Through interactive role-playing, participants learn to enhance customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

CX Escape Room: Customer Journey Breakout

Customer Journey Breakout is an engaging, immersive escape room experience designed to deepen participants' understanding of the customer journey through interactive puzzles and tasks related to customer experience challenges.

Run this with your team

We facilitate these CX games as live workshops tailored to your organisation.

Book a call All games