Understanding your customers is key to any successful business. An empathy map is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you see the world from your customers' point of view. By using empathy maps, you can gather valuable insights into what your customers think, feel, say, and do. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about an empathy map, from its basic format to best practices, and how to avoid common mistakes. Whether you’re new to empathy mapping or looking to refine your skills, this guide will help you connect with your customers on a deeper level.
What is an Empathy Map
An empathy map is a collaborative visual tool that helps businesses understand their customers better. It’s a simple, graphical way to see things from the customers' perspective. By organizing information about what customers think, feel, say, and do, businesses can gain deeper insights into their needs, motivations, pain points and experiences.
An empathy map breaks down customer experiences into four main areas: what the customer says out loud in interviews or feedback, what they are thinking but might not voice openly, the actions they take like using a product or visiting a website, and the emotions they experience throughout their journey.
This process helps businesses to identify pain points, understanding the challenges and frustrations customers face. They also recognize gains, seeing the benefits customers are looking for. This information is crucial for creating better products and services that truly address customer needs, improving marketing strategies to craft messages that resonate with the target audience, and enhancing customer experience by making interactions more positive and meaningful.
Features of an Empathy Map
The empathy map consists of several sections that capture different aspects of the customer’s experience. By filling out these sections, an empathy map provides a clear and comprehensive picture of the customer’s experience. This visual format helps businesses see and understand their customers’ perspectives more effectively. Here are the main sections:
Says
This section includes what the customer says out loud. It could be comments, feedback, or quotes from interviews and surveys. These are the direct statements made by the customer.
Thinks
In this part, you capture what the customer is thinking. These thoughts might not always be spoken but are important to understand their mindset and motivations. It includes their concerns, ideas, and opinions.
Does
This section focuses on the customer’s actions. What do they do? How do they interact with your product or service? Observing and noting these actions help understand their behavior and habits.
Feels
Here, you document the customer’s emotions. What feelings do they experience when using your product or service? This could include positive emotions like satisfaction and excitement, or negative ones like frustration and confusion.
Some empathy maps go beyond the four categories by adding ‘Pains’ and ‘Gains’ to the diagram. ‘Pains’ are the challenges and problems the customer faces. Identifying these helps you understand what makes their experience difficult or unsatisfactory. ‘Gains’ are the benefits the customer seeks. This includes what they hope to achieve or the positive outcomes they desire from using your product or service.
One User vs. Multiple-Users Empathy Maps
One User Empathy Map
A one user empathy map focuses on a single customer or persona. This type of map gives a detailed understanding of one specific customer’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences. It’s useful for:
Deep insights into a particular type of customer.
Understanding the needs and pain points of a key customer segment.
Developing tailored products or services for a specific user group.
Multiple-Users Empathy Map
A multiple-users empathy map combines information from several customers. This type of map identifies common trends and patterns among a group of users. It’s useful for:
Recognizing shared challenges and needs across a broader audience.
Developing general strategies that address common issues.
Creating solutions that appeal to a larger customer base.
Aggerated Empathy Maps
Aggregated empathy maps give you a big-picture view of a user group by pulling together insights from individuals with similar behaviors and needs. Instead of focusing on one user, they highlight common themes across a segment, making them a great starting point for building personas. While they don’t replace personas, they offer a more human, visual way to organize what we know about our users. They’re also handy for summarizing findings from surveys or field research. As you gather more data, you can easily update the map to keep it relevant and aligned with user insights.
Why use Empathy Maps
Build team alignment early
You can use empathy maps at the start of the UX process to create shared understanding across teams and keep the focus on real user needs.
Make sense of user research
They help you organize insights from interviews, surveys, and research notes in one place, making it easier to spot patterns and knowledge gaps.
Identify research needs
Sparse or incomplete maps can reveal where more user research is needed, guiding future investigation.
Support persona development
Aggregating empathy maps across users with similar behaviors helps define data-backed personas.
Educate teammates quickly
Empathy maps are a quick, visual way to communicate user attitudes and behaviors, helping reduce assumptions or internal bias.
Keep insights up to date
Revisit and revise empathy maps as new data comes in, keeping them accurate and relevant throughout the project.
Capture direct user input
When users help fill them out during interviews or workshops, they offer additional firsthand insight and can uncover hidden emotions or thoughts.
Who Uses Empathy Maps?
Empathy maps are widely used by various professionals and teams to gain deeper insights into their users or customers. Here are some key groups that commonly use them:
- UX designers: To understand user needs and create more user-friendly designs.
- Product managers: To align product features with user expectations and improve user satisfaction.
- Marketing teams: To develop targeted campaigns and messaging that resonate with their audience.
- Customer service teams: To enhance customer interactions and address pain points effectively.
- Business strategists: To inform decision-making and identify new opportunities based on user insights.
- Development teams: To build features that are truly useful and relevant to users' needs.
How to Use Creately for your Empathy Mapping
Follow these steps on how to create an empathy map to obtain valuable insights into your customers. This will help you better understand and meet their needs.
Step 1: Select an Empathy Map Template
Browse the template menu and select a template that works best for you. If you’re unsure how the process goes, our templates will help you by providing the basic empathy map design to get started. Seeing the blank template on the Creately workspace will give you a clue where to begin and what information needs to be gathered.
You can use a template like the one in the example below.
Step 2: Define your Objective
Start by clearly defining what you want to achieve, and add this vital piece of context to the workspace as a note. Ask yourself:
- What specific aspect of the customer experience are we focusing on? For example, are you looking to understand customer pain points related to a new product feature or overall satisfaction with your service?
- Who is the target audience? Are you focusing on a particular customer segment or persona?
- What are the key questions we want to answer? For example, what challenges do customers face, or what motivates them?
Having a clear objective helps narrow your focus and ensures that the empathy map is relevant and actionable.
Step 3: Gather data
Collect a variety of data to get a comprehensive view of your customers. Use these methods:
Interviews
Conduct one-on-one interviews with customers to dive deep into their experiences. Prepare open-ended questions that encourage detailed responses. Record and transcribe these interviews to capture accurate insights.
Surveys
Distribute surveys to gather feedback from a larger audience. Design questions that cover different aspects of the customer experience, including their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Use both quantitative (e.g., rating scales) and qualitative (e.g., open text) questions.
Observations
Observe customers interacting with your product or service. This could be in a store, through user testing sessions, or by analyzing user behavior on your website or app. Take note of their actions and reactions.
Feedback
Review existing feedback from sources like customer reviews, support tickets, and social media. This feedback provides insights into common issues and customer sentiments.
Step 4: Invite your Team to Collaborate
You will need a diverse team to get a well-rounded perspective on the customer experience. Invite the following team members to your Creately workspace so they can contribute to your analysis. You can send them a shareable link, and collaborate in real-time.
- Marketing: Provides insights into customer needs and how they respond to messaging.
- Product Development: Understands how customer feedback can inform product features and improvements.
- Customer Service: Offers firsthand knowledge of common customer issues and interactions.
- Sales: Provides context on customer motivations and purchasing behavior.
A cross-functional team ensures that the empathy mapping process captures various viewpoints and leads to more effective solutions.
Step 5: Fill in the Map
Use the collected data to populate the blank sections of the empathy map template on your workspace.
- Says: Record direct quotes from customer interviews, surveys, and feedback. This section should include verbatim statements that highlight what customers are explicitly expressing.
- Thinks: Based on your understanding of customer attitudes and insights from their feedback, infer what they might be thinking. This could involve understanding their unspoken concerns or aspirations.
- Does: Detail the actions customers take, such as their behavior patterns, usage of your product or service, and any notable interactions. This section should reflect observable actions and habits.
- Feels: Capture the emotions customers experience during their interactions. This includes feelings of satisfaction, frustration, excitement, or disappointment. Use qualitative data from interviews and observations to accurately represent their emotional states.
Step 6: Review and revise
Collaborate with your team to ensure the empathy map is accurate and complete. Go through each section and discuss whether the information truly represents the customer experience. Look for any gaps or inconsistencies. Make necessary adjustments to improve accuracy and clarity. Update the map with additional insights or corrections based on team feedback. Ensure the map reflects a well-rounded view of the customer.
Step 7: Share the Insights
Share your findings after exporting the completed empathy map into PNG, JPEG, and PDF formats or create a slideshow in Creately to show the relevant stakeholders without ever leaving your workspace. You will now be able to leverage these insights to make informed decisions and improvements as shown below.
- Product development: Use insights to design or enhance features that address customer needs and pain points. Focus on creating solutions that provide real value.
- Marketing strategies: Tailor your marketing messages to resonate with customer emotions and motivations. Develop campaigns that address their concerns and highlight the benefits they seek.
- Customer service: Improve support by addressing common issues and frustrations identified in the empathy map. Enhance customer interactions to increase satisfaction.
- Overall business decisions: Apply the insights to broader business strategies, including strategic planning and customer experience initiatives. Ensure that decisions align with customer needs and expectations.
Creately AI Empathy Map Template
Now that you understand the empathy mapping process, it’s time to show you an even easier method. Creately’s AI empathy map templates can automatically generate the basic structure and fill in the content based on the context you provide. All you have to do is select the AI template, enter your requirement as a prompt, and click ‘Generate’ to jumpstart your customer analysis with a minimum of hassle.
Importance of Empathy Mapping
Empathy mapping is crucial for several reasons:
Understand your customers better
Empathy mapping helps you see things from your customers' perspective. By understanding what they think, feel, say, and do, you get a clearer picture of their needs and experiences. This deeper understanding allows you to create products and services that truly resonate with them.
Improve product development
When you know your customers' pain points and desires, you can design products that address their real issues. Empathy mapping helps you identify what features are important and what problems need solving, leading to better, more relevant products.
Enhance marketing strategies
Empathy maps provide insights into what motivates your customers and what messages will connect with them. This helps you craft marketing campaigns that speak directly to their needs and emotions, making your messages more effective and engaging.
Boost customer satisfaction
By understanding your customers' experiences and challenges, you can improve their interactions with your business. Empathy mapping helps you identify areas where you can enhance customer service and create a better overall experience.
Foster team collaboration
Creating an empathy map involves input from various team members. This collaboration helps everyone in the organization align with the customer’s perspective, leading to more unified and effective strategies across departments.
Make informed business decisions
Empathy mapping provides valuable insights that guide business decisions. Whether it’s developing new products, improving existing ones, or adjusting marketing strategies, having a clear understanding of your customers helps you make choices that are more likely to succeed.
When to Use Empathy Maps
Empathy maps are useful in several situations:
- During product development - Use empathy maps when you’re creating or improving a product. They help you understand what your customers need and want, which guides you in designing features that will really work for them.
- For marketing campaigns - When planning marketing campaigns, empathy maps can show you what messages will resonate with your audience. Understanding their thoughts and feelings helps you craft more effective and targeted advertisements.
- To improve customer service - If you’re looking to enhance your customer service, empathy maps can highlight common customer issues and frustrations. This insight helps you make changes that improve their overall experience.
- In user experience (UX) design - When designing websites or apps, empathy maps help you understand how users interact with your platform. This helps you create a smoother, more user-friendly experience.
- When entering new markets - If you’re expanding into new markets or targeting a new customer segment, empathy maps help you understand the unique needs and preferences of these new customers, allowing you to tailor your approach effectively.
- For team alignment - Use empathy maps to get your team on the same page about customer needs and experiences. This ensures that everyone in your organization understands and works towards addressing those needs.
Best Practices for Effective Empathy Mapping
Involve diverse team members
Include people from different departments, such as marketing, product development, and customer service. This ensures you capture various perspectives and get a more comprehensive view of the customer experience. A broader perspective leads to richer discussions, fewer assumptions, and greater team alignment around user insights.
Use real customer data
Base your empathy map on actual data from customer interviews, surveys, and feedback. Avoid assumptions and ensure your insights reflect real customer experiences. Enhance mapping sessions with photos, videos, or audio clips from real users. These assets deepen empathy and can spark more meaningful observations that go beyond surface-level assumptions.
Update regularly
Review and update your map periodically as customer needs and behaviors can change over time. Keeping them current ensures your strategies remain relevant and effective.
Focus on specific customer segments
You should keep a separate empathy map template for different customer segments or personas. This helps you address the unique needs and preferences of each group more accurately.
Be detailed and specific
Fill in each section of the empathy map template with specific, detailed information. Avoid generalizations and ensure that the map provides clear insights into what customers think, feel, say, and do.
Collaborate and review
Work with your team to review and validate the empathy map. Collaboration helps ensure accuracy and completeness, and reviewing the map together can uncover additional insights. For distributed or hybrid teams, use online whiteboards or mapping tools to co-create empathy maps in real time. This keeps all input centralized, accessible, and easier to update over time.
Use empathy maps as a living document
Treat the empathy map as a dynamic tool that evolves with your understanding of customers. Use it to guide decision-making and regularly refer to it when developing strategies or solutions.
Differentiate Empathy Maps from Journey Maps
Use empathy maps to explore users’ emotional and cognitive states during specific interactions. Pair them with journey maps to understand the full experience across touchpoints. This distinction helps teams apply the right tool at the right time.
Connect Empathy Maps to Personas
Don’t treat empathy maps as standalone artifacts. Use them as a foundation for developing or refining personas by grouping shared behaviors, needs, and frustrations into distinct user types.
Benefits of Empathy Mapping
Empathy maps help teams better understand their users by viewing things from the user’s perspective. When done right, they can influence how an entire organization thinks about and supports its users.
Make insights easier to grasp
They simplify complex research by breaking down what users say, think, feel, and do into clear, actionable points.
Highlight real user experiences
Empathy maps bring focus to users’ day-to-day challenges and emotional reactions, helping teams spot where the product experience can improve.
Align cross-functional teams
Although usually created by design or research teams, empathy maps are useful across product, marketing, and support—keeping everyone aligned around the user’s needs.
Drawbacks of Empathy Mapping
While empathy maps are incredibly useful, they do come with a few limitations to keep in mind:
Limited perspective
Interpreting user data always comes with the risk of misunderstanding or oversimplifying what users actually think or feel. This can sometimes lead to a skewed or incomplete view.
Lack of broader context
Since empathy maps focus on specific user interactions, they may miss external influences—like environment or culture—that affect user behavior but aren’t captured in the map.
Not a standalone solution
Relying solely on empathy maps can leave gaps in understanding. They work best when paired with other research methods like interviews, usability tests, or surveys.
Static snapshots
User needs and emotions change over time, but empathy maps don’t update themselves. They need to be revisited and revised regularly to stay accurate and relevant.
To get a complete picture of your users, it’s best to use empathy maps alongside other design and research tools.
Empathy Mapping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Avoid these common empathy mapping mistakes to create a more effective and useful empathy map that helps you better understand and meet your customers' needs.
Relying on assumptions
Mistake: Assuming you know what customers think and feel without real data can lead to inaccurate insights.
How to avoid: Base your information on actual customer feedback, interviews, and observations. Use real data to ensure your insights are accurate.
Overlooking diverse perspectives
Mistake: Not involving a diverse team can lead to a limited view of the customer experience.
How to avoid: Include team members from different departments and backgrounds. This helps capture a wider range of insights and perspectives.
Ignoring updates
Mistake: Keeping an outdated empathy map design can lead to irrelevant insights as customer needs change over time.
How to avoid: Regularly review and update your empathy map based on new data and changing customer behaviors.
Being too general
Mistake: Using vague or general information can make the empathy map less useful and actionable.
How to avoid: Provide specific details and examples in each section of the map. The more detailed and precise, the more valuable the insights will be.
Not validating the map
Mistake: Failing to review the completed map with others can lead to overlooked errors or missed insights.
How to avoid: Collaborate with your team to review and validate. Discuss each section to ensure accuracy and completeness.
Neglecting to act on insights
Mistake: Going through the mapping process but not using the insights to make decisions can waste the effort put into it.
How to avoid: Use the insights from your empathy map to guide product development, marketing strategies, and customer service improvements. Apply the findings to make real changes.
More Empathy Map Templates By Creately
Helpful Resources for Making Empathy Maps
A step-by-step guide to understanding how to create an empathy map.
Learn how using our empathy map templates can help understand your customers better.
Use this AI-powered tool to speed up your empathy map analysis.
Conclusion
An empathy map is a valuable tool for understanding your customers. It helps you gain insights into their thoughts, feelings, and actions, guiding you in designing better products, crafting effective marketing strategies, and improving customer experiences.
To make the most of empathy mapping, remember to involve diverse team members, use real customer data, and keep your maps updated. By following these practices, you can create more relevant solutions and strengthen your customer relationships.
Overall, empathy maps allow you to see things from your customers' perspectives, leading to more informed business decisions and better customer experiences.
FAQs about Empathy Maps
When should I use an empathy map?
Empathy maps are useful in:
- User research to synthesize findings.
- Design thinking to create user-centered solutions.
- Team collaboration to align on user needs
How can we use AI for empathy maps?
What is the difference between One User vs. Multiple-Users Empathy Maps?
What is the difference between Empathy Maps vs Personas?
What is the difference between empathy maps and journey maps?
Can empathy mapping be used outside of UX design?
Resources
Cairns, P., Pinker, I., Ward, A., Watson, E. and Laidlaw, A. (2020). Empathy Maps in Communication Skills Training. The Clinical Teacher, 18(2), pp.142–146. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/tct.13270.
Ferreira, B., Conte, T. and Diniz Junqueira Barbosa, S. (2015). Eliciting Requirements Using Personas and Empathy Map to Enhance the User Experience. [online] IEEE Xplore. doi:https://doi.org/10.1109/SBES.2015.14.
Neubauer, D., Paepcke-Hjeltness, V., Evans, P., Barnhart, B. and Finseth, T. (2017). Experiencing Technology Enabled Empathy Mapping. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), pp.S4683–S4689. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352966.
