Empathy Map ⚑
Visual organizing what a user says, thinks, does, and feels.
The Empathy Map is the design-research visualization tool that captures a customer's experience across multiple dimensions in a structured canvas, used in design-thinking and user-research contexts to develop customer empathy and align team understanding. The tool was articulated by Dave Gray of XPLANE in collaboration with the broader design-thinking community, with the original four-quadrant version (Says, Thinks, Does, Feels) emerging in mid-2000s practice and the more elaborate six-section version (Says, Thinks, Does, Feels, plus Pain and Gain) appearing in subsequent iterations. The empathy map is typically arranged around a central representation of a specific customer or persona, with sections capturing: what the customer SAYS (direct quotes, expressed words); THINKS (internal thoughts and beliefs not always expressed); DOES (observable behaviors and actions); FEELS (emotions and emotional states); along with PAINS (frustrations, obstacles, fears) and GAINS (desires, success measures, hopes). The tool is principally used in early-stage design-research synthesis after customer interviews or observation, in cross-functional alignment workshops where teams need to share customer understanding, and as an artifact for ongoing reference during design and development. Empathy maps integrate closely with personas (which provide the 'who') and with customer journey mapping (which provides the 'when and where'). The framework's commercial popularity through Strategyzer (Alexander Osterwalder's company, which produces canvases including the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, and Empathy Map Canvas) has substantially shaped contemporary practice.
Core components
- Four original quadrants: Says, Thinks, Does, Feels
- Six-section variant adds Pains and Gains
- Central customer or persona representation
- Application after customer interviews or observation
- Cross-functional alignment use
- Connection to personas and customer journey mapping
- Strategyzer Empathy Map Canvas commercial version
- Integration with design-thinking workflows
- Distinction between the customer's expressed and internal experience
Primary use case
Design-research synthesis after customer interviews; cross-functional team alignment workshops; product-strategy and feature-prioritization input; foundation for many design-thinking workshops; integration with personas and customer journey maps; basis for some user-experience design briefs; growing application in B2B and enterprise contexts.
Common criticisms
- Distinction between Says-Thinks (internal vs expressed) and Does-Feels (observable vs internal) requires substantial inferential work that researchers often do without sufficient evidence
- risk of projecting researcher assumptions about what customers think and feel rather than grounding in actual research
- tendency to populate the canvas with general claims rather than specific customer evidence
- commercial design-thinking industry has produced compliance-style empathy mapping with varying analytical fidelity
- works best when grounded in substantial customer research, with limited value as standalone team brainstorm without research input
- the 'empathy' framing can mask the genuine challenge of understanding customers different from oneself
- integration with quantitative customer-behavior data is typically weak
- multiple competing canvas formats create which-version-when ambiguity
- cultural variation in how customers express themselves (high-context vs low-context cultures) affects what 'says' captures
- can become decorative artifact rather than strategic input.
Lineage
- Siblings
- Personas, Customer Journey Mapping