An empathy map is a collaborative visualization tool used to organize, articulate, and synthesize what we know about a particular type of user. Originally created by Dave Gray and his team at XPLANE in the early 2000s, it serves to externalize user insights, align cross-functional teams around a shared vocabulary, and guide human-centered design decisions during product or service discovery.
While an audience persona defines who the user is by summarizing their long-term demographics, goals, and behavioral patterns, an empathy map captures what they are experiencing in a particular moment or specific scenario.
The Core Four Quadrants
In its traditional format, an empathy map is split into four quadrants arranged around a central user or persona:
- Says: This section contains what the user says out loud during interviews, user-testing sessions, or field studies. Ideally, it is populated with direct, verbatim quotes. Capturing their exact phrasing helps keep the team grounded in concrete evidence rather than speculative paraphrasing.
- Thinks: This quadrant captures what occupies the user’s thoughts throughout their experience, especially what they might be reluctant to vocalize. These insights are inferred from reading between the lines, noting hesitations, or examining context.
- Does: This section documents the observable physical actions, behaviors, and workarounds the user takes during task completion (e.g., refreshes page several times or writes notes on paper before entering data). It highlights the gap between what users say they do and what they actually do.
- Feels: This captures the emotional state of the user, usually represented by an adjective and a short sentence for context (e.g., confused: too many contradictory prices or anxious: worried they are doing something wrong). This quadrant helps teams look beyond functional complaints toward understanding the emotional experience underneath.
The Extended Sections (Modern Frameworks)
As empathy mapping evolved, practitioners like the Nielsen Norman Group and healthcare entities began adapting the canvas. Many modern templates feature additional sections to capture sensory inputs and structural goals:
- Hear: What the user reads, or what they hear from friends, family, colleagues, and influential authority figures that impacts their worldview.
- See: What the user physically sees in their immediate environment, organizational dynamics, or broader market trends while executing a task.
- Pains (Challenges): The core frustrations, obstacles, fears, or red tape blocking the user from successfully reaching their goal.
- Gains (Opportunities): The user’s ultimate hopes, dreams, aspirations, or the positive outcomes they expect to experience once their friction is resolved.
The Real Power: Finding Tensions and Gaps
The true value of an empathy map does not come from filling out the quadrants in isolation; it comes from identifying contradictions and tensions across the quadrants.
When a team analyzes all sections together, they often spot revealing inconsistencies—such as a user who says “I want more features” but does a workaround because they are feeling overwhelmed by the current UI. These frictions and misalignments are where the most valuable design insights and opportunities for innovation live.