Creating an empathy map is an essential step in understanding your audience deeply and designing experiences that truly resonate with their needs. By visualizing a user’s thoughts, emotions, attitudes, behaviors, and pain points, you gain valuable insights that help shape products, services, and strategies effectively.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to build an empathy map step by step, and best practices to refine your approach. Whether you’re in UX design, marketing, or business development, mastering this tool will enhance your ability to connect with and serve your audience better.
What is an Empathy Map
An empathy map is a visual tool used to understand and articulate the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of a user or customer. It helps teams develop a deeper insight into their audience by categorizing information into key areas. Typically, an empathy map is divided into four quadrants of what a user says, thinks, does and feels.
Empathy maps are commonly used in UX design, marketing, and business strategy to build products and services that truly resonate with customers. They enhance customer understanding by bridging the gap between assumptions and real user experiences. Read empathy maps to learn more.
You can get an idea what an empathy map looks like in the example below.
The Four Main Elements of an Empathy Map
Every empathy map centers on four key aspects that capture critical elements of user experience. Understanding each core element reveals emotional drivers and behavioral patterns essential for informed design and user research.
Says
Direct quotes from user interviews or feedback sessions that express explicit opinions, preferences, and frustrations. This aspect grounds our analysis in real language, capturing what users express verbally. It helps us understand their direct feedback and opinions.
Thinks
Unspoken motivations, worries, and emotional drivers inferred from language cues and context. By exploring what users think, we can uncover their underlying emotions and beliefs. This insight allows us to grasp their motivations and thought processes.
Does
Observable actions and behaviors users perform in their environment or while interacting with a product. This point highlights the actual actions users take. Observing their behaviors helps us identify patterns and interactions with our product or service.
Feels
Emotional responses and sentiments that influence user behavior, often shaped by personal experiences and interactions. Understanding how users feel is crucial for identifying emotional responses. This insight can guide us in addressing pain points and enhancing user experience.
Together, these four elements create a comprehensive view of user behavior, enabling teams to connect attitudes with actions and prioritize design improvements effectively.
How to Create an Empathy Map in Creately
Learn how to create an empathy map with this detailed step-by-step guide using Creately’s collaborative platform. By following these steps, teams can run a seamless empathy mapping exercise across locations in real time.
Step 1: Preparing Your Creately Workspace
Select the pre-built empathy map template from the templates menu. Seeing the four empathy map quadrants neatly laid out on your workspace will give you a clue what information is needed to complete your analysis and which steps to take next.
Step 2: Define Purpose and Objectives
Define your primary purpose in performing an empathy map analysis and what you hope to achieve as objectives. You will need to:
- Decide the customer experience focus—whether it’s addressing pain points related to a new feature or evaluating overall service satisfaction.
- Identify the target audience by specifying the relevant customer segment or persona.
- Clarify key questions, such as customer challenges or motivations, to gain valuable insights.
Edit the empathy map template to your specific objectives and scope.
Step 3: Invite Team to Collaborate
Clarify what insights you need to capture, set timeboxes for each activity, and assign team roles for note-taking and facilitation. Invite your team to join your Creately workspace, ensuring everyone can contribute simultaneously. You may need the expertise of the following teams:
- Marketing: To analyze customer needs and reactions to messaging
- Product Development: To understand customer feedback to enhance features and improvements.
- Customer Service: To gather insights from direct interactions during customer issues.
- Sales: To interpret customer motivations and purchasing behaviors.
Step 4: Gather Qualitative Data
Empathy mapping requires qualitative data. Compile interview summaries, survey quotes, diary entries, listening sessions, and field notes for direct import. Ask participants to highlight verbatim quotes and tag entries for thematic categorization. This data will provide an understanding of the users' motivations, goals, and pain points. You can learn more about how to gather this data in the following section.
Creately allows you to attach interview transcripts, survey responses, and observation notes directly to the map for easy reference.
Step 5: Start filling the Empathy Map Template
Start filling in the template to complete your empathy map.
Says: This will be filled by direct customer quotes from interviews, surveys, and feedback to capture explicit expressions.
Thinks: You will need to infer customers' unspoken concerns and aspirations based on their attitudes and feedback to fill this section.
Does: Add the observed customer behaviors, usage patterns, and interactions with your product or service.
Feels: Emotional responses such as satisfaction, frustration, excitement, or disappointment can be added using qualitative data.
By inviting stakeholders to join the workspace, you can run interactive empathy mapping workshops and link stakeholder feedback in real time. Encourage participants to vote on critical insights using reaction tools.
Step 6: Synthesize Insights and Refine Empathy Map
With the information added, you will be able to identify patterns, group related notes, and highlight key themes. Start by clustering related notes that belong to the same quadrant. Use Creately’s grouping and connector tools to illustrate relationships and refine your empathy map.
If additional details are required or your scenario requires a unique approach, try adapting the empathy map to include additional quadrants like goals, pains, and gains.
Step 7: Export and Share Findings
Once it is completed, you will need to step back and reflect on your findings to truly understand the users’ experience. Get your team members to share their perspectives, what insights they gathered from the empathy map and brainstorm ideas to move forward with the next design, development, and testing cycles.
In Creately, you can export your empathy map to formats like PNG, CSV, or PDF and even conduct a slideshow on the workspace.
Using Creately’s AI Empathy Map Template
Utilizing Creately’s AI empathy map template, teams can auto-populate empathy maps with categories filled in instantly. This helps teams quickly generate and refine user insights in fewer steps, which ultimately speeds up the analysis. All you have to do is select the AI empathy map template, enter your user persona or audience related instructions to the AI as a prompt, and click ‘Generate’. The AI will then generate content for each quadrant of the empathy map based on your instructions. It’s as easy as that!
Data Needed for Creating Your Empathy Map
Essential qualitative inputs for an effective empathy map ensure authenticity and depth in capturing user perspectives. These data sources help teams create an empathy map grounded in real experiences.
Interview quotes
Record direct user quotes during interviews to preserve authentic language, revealing true motivations, concerns, and phrasing for design artifacts.
Observations
Document behaviors, nonverbal cues, and environmental context observed during user sessions or field studies to inform the ‘Does’ and ‘Sees’ quadrants with accuracy.
Surveys & Diaries
Collect structured self-reported feedback via surveys or diary studies, enabling longitudinal tracking of attitudes, challenges, and evolving needs over time.
Analytics & Feedback
Integrate usage analytics, customer support tickets, and NPS responses to complement qualitative findings with quantitative context, identifying trends and validating hypotheses.
Best Practices for Effective Empathy Mapping
Adhering to best practices enhances both the efficiency and credibility of your empathy mapping exercise.
Keep Empathy Mapping Sessions User-focused
Capture verbatim quotes and observed behaviors without diverging into ideation. Assign a facilitator, use timeboxes for each quadrant, and defer solution brainstorming to follow-up workshops to preserve data integrity during the empathy mapping exercise.
Include Cross-functional Participants
UX, product, marketing, and support—to surface diverse viewpoints. Rotate note-taking roles and pair participants for cross-verification. This approach enriches the empathy mapping exercise by uncovering blind spots and strengthening data reliability.
Use Authentic User Data
Attach direct quotes, observation notes, and media references to map items. Link each note to its original source using Creately’s attachment feature for traceability, bolstering credibility when sharing insights with stakeholders.
Benefits of Using Empathy Maps
Empathy maps offer tangible benefits that drive user-centered decisions. They simplify complex data and foster alignment around real user perspectives.
- Align cross-functional teams around a unified understanding of user needs, reducing miscommunication and enabling faster consensus on design priorities during workshops and planning sessions.
- Identify pain points and uncover hidden opportunities by visualizing user frustrations and motivations, guiding product improvements and feature roadmaps with a clear evidence-based foundation.
- Enhance product decisions with authentic user emotions and behaviors, ensuring features, flows, and content resonate with real needs rather than assumptions.
- Boost stakeholder buy-in by presenting a compelling visual narrative that illustrates user perspectives, making it easier to secure support and resources for proposed solutions.
More Empathy Map Templates By Creately
Helpful Resources for Making Empathy Maps
A practical guide to understanding how an empathy map can help businesses.
Learn how using our empathy map canvas can help understand your customers better.
Use this AI-powered tool to speed up your empathy map analysis.
Conclusion
The more accurately you understand your audience, the better equipped you will be to create solutions that truly meet their needs. Now that you have completed this guide, you have the know-how to build empathy maps both from scratch, and by utilizing Creately’s latest AI-powered templates to speed up the process. You will be bringing user-centered thinking into every aspect of your work in no time.
FAQs about Creating Empathy Maps
How often should empathy maps be updated?
How is an empathy map different from a user persona?
What are the limitations of empathy maps?
Can empathy maps be used for teams or organizations?
Can we draw empathy maps using AI?
Resources:
Higuera, M. and Macías, J.A. (2024). A Novel AI Approach for the Systematic Creation of Empathy Maps. International journal of human-computer interaction, pp.1–14. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2024.2323301.
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.
Sinansari, P., Salsabila, S.H., Hanoum, S., Lopatka, A. and Wlodarski, W. (2023). Identify Customer Element Through Empathy Map and User Persona. Procedia Computer Science, [online] 225, pp.4148–4156. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2023.10.411.
