Empathy maps help build better products

Empathy maps are your secret weapon for building better software

You've shipped a feature your team spent months building, only to discover users aren't using it the way you expected. Worse, maybe they aren't using it at all…

Often there can be a disconnect between what we think users need and what they actually need. Empathy maps are a simple tool that can transform how your team understands users and meets their needs in the longer term.

Collaborative Visualisation

Empathy maps are collaborative tools that help us visualise what we know about users. This helps to foster a shared understanding of user needs and drive better decision making as to what, why and how we build features.

Understanding the empathy map framework

Essentially, an empathy map is a canvas divided into four quadrants with your user in the centre.  Each quadrant captures a different dimension of the user experience:

Says

Capture quotes from user research. This quadrant focuses on the actual words users speak during interviews or other communication methods. This isn't paraphrasing; it's direct evidence of how users articulate their experience.

Thinks 

Dive deeper into what occupies users' minds throughout their experience. This quadrant explores questions/concerns users might be too polite, uncertain, or embarrassed to talk about. For example, when a user struggles with your interface, they might say "this is interesting," but think "am I too dumb to figure this out?"

Does 

Tracks observable actions and behaviours within the product and/or feature. This quadrant documents how users actually interact with the product. For example, do they refresh pages repeatedly? These actions often tell a different story than words alone.

Feels 

It is essential to also capture our user’s emotional state. This quadrant is typically expressed as adjectives with context, for example "Impatient: pages load too slowly" or "Anxious: worried about making a mistake." Understanding the emotional dimension is crucial because feelings drive behaviour more than logic does.

Optional Extras:

Modern versions sometimes add Goals at the top and distinguish between Pains (obstacles, fears, frustrations) and Gains (wants, needs, hopes) to provide even more context.

Empathy maps are different from personas or journey maps.

Empathy maps help you understand who the user is at a specific moment,

Personas represent user archetypes across your entire product

Journey maps show experiences over time.

All three are complementary tools, not competitors. For example, multiple empathy maps can often feed into creating a robust persona.

Why software product teams need empathy maps

Empathy maps deliver value in distinct ways:

Process value

Creating empathy maps forces cross-functional collaboration that builds shared understanding. When your UX designer, developers, marketers, and support team all contribute to mapping a user, something magical happens: You create a common language about users that cuts through silos and eliminates those painful "but I thought the user wanted..." debates.

Source of Truth

Once created, the empathy map becomes your source of truth, protecting against bias and unfounded assumptions. It keeps decisions focused on the user by replacing internal hunches with real quotes and behaviours during planning and reviews.

Remove/Challenge Bias

Empathy maps help teams reduce bias within designs and guide meaningful innovation by revealing user needs that users themselves might not articulate.

They enable better feature prioritisation by identifying which pain points matter most.

Benefits for Software development

Empathy maps integrate seamlessly into sprint planning, backlog refinement, and testing validation, adding valuable context to development teams.

While digital products hide user emotions and struggles behind screens, empathy maps shed light on them. You might see that users abandon your signup flow, but analytics won't tell you they felt "overwhelmed and confused" in the moment. Empathy maps fill that gap.

Creating effective empathy maps

Run a workshop:

Before the workshop,

Gather your qualitative research materials:

• user interview transcripts

• usability test observations

• customer support call notes

• survey responses.

You need real user data, not assumptions.

Assemble a cross-functional team of 5-8 people including designers, developers, marketers, and anyone who interacts with users and Schedule a 90-minute session and choose your medium: digital tools like Miro, FigJam, or Creately for remote teams, or a whiteboard with coloured sticky notes for in-person sessions.

During the session,

Start with a quick warm-up using an unrelated persona to get everyone in the right mindset.

Then comes the critical individual contribution phase: give everyone 10-15 minutes to review research materials and write insights on sticky notes (or digital equivalents) for each quadrant independently. This prevents groupthink and ensures diverse perspectives surface.

Next, move to collaborative clustering. Have everyone share their notes, grouping similar ideas together. Name the clusters with themes like "needs guidance" or "time-constrained."

Don't force neat categorisation. Instead, embrace messy overlaps and contradictions. Pay special attention to contradictions between quadrants, there is a lot of value to be found when you find deeper patterns/trends user behaviour.

Finally, synthesise and document. Polish the map for sharing, and most importantly, extract 3-5 actionable insights immediately. Connect these insights to your product roadmap within a week while momentum is high.

After the workshop,

Digitise the map and make it accessible to all stakeholders.

Link it to your personas, journey maps, and user stories.

Use it during sprint planning, design reviews, and stakeholder presentations.

Most importantly, treat it as a living document. Update it quarterly or after major research initiatives as you learn more about your users.