Empathy mapping: How to bridge the gap between users and design

When you're designing for a user you barely know, it's easy to make assumptions about how they think and feel—we all do it, but assumptions are a slippery slope leading to flawed products.

An empathy map can help bridge this gap. It's a visual tool that lets designers step into their users' shoes, capturing their experiences, preferences, pain points, and behaviors. The result? Designs that resonate, solutions that solve real problems, and genuinely satisfied users.

In this article, we give you actionable steps to create a powerful customer experience empathy map, complete with a free downloadable template to get you started.

The empathy map was originally developed in 2010 by Dave Gray, co-founder of XPLANE, to help teams better understand their users. The canvas is divided into four quadrants, with a central space representing the user.

The four main sections of the empathy map reflect what the user:

1. Says: This quadrant captures verbatim quotes from the user during user interviews or usability tests. It's what the user expresses out loud, providing direct insights into their thoughts and feelings.

2. Thinks: This section represents what the user might be thinking but not explicitly saying. It's about inferring the user's beliefs, concerns, and aspirations based on their behavior and other cues (e.g., clickstream data, UX surveys, facial expressions).

3. Does: This area focuses on the user's actions and behaviors, specifically their interactions within the product. It examines what they do, how they do it, their habits within the product, and patterns in their decision-making.

4. Feels: The last quadrant explores the user's emotional state. It captures feelings through surveys, in-app feedback mechanisms (like star rating scales or emoticons), and by analyzing their behavior (e.g., time spent on tasks, frustration clicks).

Gray's updated version from 2017 adds two more sections:

When you populate these quadrants with insights, UX teams can build a complete picture of your users. This leads to more informed, user-centered design decisions.

While individual empathy maps offer deep insights into specific users, aggregated empathy maps work the same but feature data from multiple users, helping teams understand overarching trends and make design decisions based on a wider user base.

They're particularly useful for:

Lucas Botzen, CEO at Rivermate, believes that empathy mapping is a mindset that can help us all stay closer to our users.

“At Rivermate, we’ve seen firsthand how empathy mapping impacts all of our product development and helps create meaningful user experiences. Understanding users in this multidimensional way gives us immense insights that can really drive innovation or success in ways we wouldn't have thought of ourselves.” — Lucas Botzen, CEO at Rivermate

So what are the benefits of empathy mapping?

Empathy maps help you:

Empathy mapping is often confused with affinity mapping—but they’re far from the same thing.

So, where does empathy mapping fit into the UX design process? Generally speaking, the best time to create empathy maps is during the discovery stage of product development.

These are just some examples of when to create empathy maps, but the best time to use them is when you need to understand users. Here’s how Lucas uses empathy maps at Rivermate.

“We used empathy mapping at Rivermate to redraw and renew the onboarding process. We realized that new users were very overwhelmed by the initial setup. By putting ourselves in their shoes and learning what their frustrations and concerns were, we simplified the process and increased user retention by 20% in the first month.”

The key to successful empathy mapping is having the time and participants to ensure your insights are coming from users, not hidden cognitive biases.

Lucas shares: “Empathy mapping isn’t ideal for cases when there’s limited user data or tight project timelines. If you’re limited on data or rushed, it can easily turn into mere assumptions—not informed decisions.”

Here are a few other cases where empathy maps may not work:

While both affinity mapping and empathy mapping support user-centered design, they serve distinct purposes and are used at different stages of the design process.

Empathy mapping focuses on understanding the user's perspective. It visualizes their thoughts, feelings, actions, and surroundings to build empathy. This helps designers create products and services that cater to user needs and frustrations.

Affinity maps (also called affinity diagrams) focus on organizing and analyzing large amounts of data. It helps identify patterns, trends, and themes within user research findings, user interviews, or brainstorming sessions. This process allows designers to synthesize information and extract actionable insights.

Here are the steps to create an empathy map for a deeper understanding of the user, leading to a better customer experience.

First, focus your efforts so the empathy mapping exercise aligns with your overall UX research objectives and business objectives. Are you looking to improve a specific product, service, or touchpoint, or are you aiming for a broader understanding of your customers?

Identifying the target audience is also essential; determine which specific customer segment or persona you'll be mapping to ensure accurate and actionable insights.

With clear goals you’re in a stronger position to identify and recruit research participants. Your empathy maps, generally speaking, should shine a light on an existing persona (although they can sometimes be used as a basis for building user personas if you’re starting from scratch). Your goals will relate to a specific persona or set of personas, and these are the profiles you’re looking to recruit for empathy mapping research.

User personas represent broad types of users, but it’s also crucial to consider the diverse profiles within each persona to ensure you’re building inclusive designs. Lucas recommends recruiting participants from diverse backgrounds for your research and testing:

“To ensure your empathy maps are inclusive, we make it a purposeful goal to get diverse users—and therefore, diverse opinions.

“We aim to recruit participants from varied walks of life, we incorporate accessibility tools and inclusive design techniques to ensure our products consider the differences in needs among our users.

“The more feedback we get from as many users as possible, the more real the reflection of our users is within the empathy map.”

To create an empathy map, you'll need materials like a whiteboard, sticky notes, and markers. If you're working remotely, digital tools like Miro, Figma, or Sketch can be excellent alternatives for collaborative mapping.

The next step is to conduct UX research and gather the data to inform your empathy map. Conducting user research is a task in and of itself, but the best approach is mixed methods research. By combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, you’ll get a wide variety of data that can populate different quadrants of the empathy map.

For example, you could send out a user survey to gather quantitative data on how users are feeling about your product and its user experience. You can then follow up with interview studies to dig into the why behind survey responses. Alongside this user research, you can also look to product analytics for additional information that doesn’t come directly from the user.

Once you’ve gathered your user insights, separate them into the different quadrants of your empathy maps. Consider which quadrant each insight belongs to; what the user says, thinks, does, and feels.

You can create an empathy map for each of your user personas—just make sure you adequately manage data to ensure you’re crystal clear on which insights relate to which persona. A highly-organized research repository can help here.

After populating each quadrant of your empathy map, the next step is to synthesize the insights gathered. This process involves analyzing information to identify key patterns, contradictions, and actionable insights to inform your design decisions.

Focus on verbs that describe activities and desires, rather than nouns that might prematurely suggest solutions. This approach helps you stay open to various possibilities and avoid jumping to conclusions too quickly.

For example:

You should also look for contradictions within or between quadrants, which can reveal deeper insights and areas of tension that need to be addressed. These contradictions often highlight unmet needs or areas where the user experience can be improved.

For example:

A varied mix of data will help you get deep insights to clarify any contradictions, and ensure your empathy maps are a true insight into user experiences.

This step is important because stakeholder buy-in ensures your insights will be used to inform product decision-making and drive user-centered design. Without stakeholder support, even the most insightful empathy map might be ignored or underutilized in the design process.

When presenting to stakeholders, start by explaining your methodology to establish credibility. Then, showcase the empathy map visually, highlighting key findings from each quadrant.

The ultimate goal of creating an empathy map is to inform and improve your design process. This final step is where you translate the insights gained from your empathy mapping exercise into actionable design decisions.

Lucas Botzen shares an example of how empathy mapping directly influenced product design at Rivermate, when the team was designing a new feature for managing remote employees:

"Empathy mapping showed that one of the users' major frustrations was disconnection and feeling unappreciated, which was part of a larger concern about being undervalued in the remote workspace.

“From here, we could shift our approach to features that build better team communication and recognition. It wilfully changed course, adding a virtual team-building tool and a system for recognition that improved user engagement and satisfaction dramatically."

Building empathy maps doesn't have to be complicated. Here are three free templates to get your team started.

Our free empathy map template offers a simple way to understand your users. By focusing on all six quadrants you can capture what users say, do, think, feel, and their pains and gains at various points in their experience. Working from the latest revision of the empathy map, paired with a clean visual design, you can gain a quick snapshot of their journey.

This straightforward, visual tool allows you to grasp user needs and frustrations at a glance, making it perfect for design sprints or brainstorming sessions.

👉 Start building user empathy within your team with Maze's downloadable template. Simply save the image above or download the empathy map template here.

This empathy map template on Figma, designed by Henna Mohammed, is great if your team is already working in Figma and wants to keep documents centralized. The addition of a persona background spot offers a place for context and relevant links to user persona docs. While the visual design differs to a classic empathy map layout, this is a ready-to-use, virtual option for anyone looking to create empathy maps in Figma.

Miro’s ‘Feelings and Thoughts’ empathy map template can be adapted to any user research project. Miro’s twist on the traditional empathy mapping terms swaps gains for goals, and brings in visual observation by combining the says and does quadrants, and adding sees. This can be ideal when conducting research via more behavior-oriented methods, like guerrilla testing or field studies (ethnographic research).

Empathy mapping is a powerful tool in a UX designer's toolkit. It offers a structured approach to understanding and visualizing user needs, behaviors, and emotions, helping bring design in line with user needs.

Ready to get started? Before you begin your empathy mapping process, you need those all-important user insights. A UX research tool like Maze can make the insight-gathering process a whole lot easier.

Maze is the user research platform that makes user insights available at the speed of product development. Bringing recruiting, conducting, analyzing, and reporting on UX research under one roof, Maze makes UX research easier for everyone involved—whether that’s researchers on the ground, or the C-Suite wanting a snapshot of user needs.