Said Did

Thought Felt

Empathy Map
An empathy map is a visualization tool which helps you sum up what you learned from design
research to help you better understand your users and articulate what you know to colleagues and
stakeholders.

The most common form of empathy map consists of four quadrants which reflect four key aspects
of the behavior users demonstrate or possess during the research stage of the design process. The
four quadrants refer to what the user: Says, Does, Thinks and Feels. There’s no set order to
complete these in; however, it’s best to start with the more objective quadrants when you create
your empathy map: Says and Does. You can then move on to determine what they think and feel
based on the objective insights you have already laid out.

Step 1: Define the scope and purpose

• Scope: Decide upon a particular persona, segment of users or individual user that you want to
base your empathy map on. Stick with 1:1 mapping at first—i.e., don’t go bonkers and think you
can cover multiple user personas in one map, initially at least. Create a different empathy map
for each persona to ensure you gather the most valuable insights.

• Purpose: What is the core purpose of your empathy map? Whether it’s to organize your research

data or inform the wider team of your findings, you should have a solid question with certain
parameters to help you focus.

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Once you have defined both your scope and purpose, make sure you have buy-in from everyone on
the team. If you have a stakeholder with strong opinions and biases, for example, make sure they’re
on board with the plan for your empathy map, and wider design project if possible.

Step 2: Conduct relevant research

It’s now time to conduct your user research if you haven’t done this already. Carry out user
interviews, user observations and other forms of research to gather data about your users. As you
can see, empathy maps are best used from the very beginning of the design process (straight after
the research phase).

Step 3: Fill out your empathy map

• Split a table into four quadrants or draw them on a large piece of paper, clipboard or whiteboard.

• Review your notes, pictures, audio and video from your research and transfer everything
meaningful to a Post-it if not already in that form. Post-it notes make it easy to remove, change
and group research data at a later stage of the process.

• Fill out each quadrant with relevant Post-it notes. Start with the more objective ones (says and
does) and then move on to the thoughts and feelings which are more likely to be inferred or
guessed. If you come across a piece of data which fits into multiple quadrants, just pick one—it’s
the insights that are of greatest importance, not necessarily the placement of the data, at this
stage.

• Once you have placed all your data into the most relevant quadrant, look at the empathy map in
its entirety. Are there certain quadrants which don’t contain very much data? If one or more
quadrants looks a bit bare, this is a good indication that you should probably do more research,
specifically to populate that quadrant.

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Step 4: Analyze the quadrant data
Once you have populated each quadrant, you need to organize and discuss what each one
contains. You should:

• Cluster similar pieces of data together.

• Give each cluster a name based on the main theme it covers. Note you can use the same name
in each quadrant if necessary.

• Discuss each cluster with your team—what does it show? Are there outliers, repeated themes or
gaps in the data? Have perceptions changed of the user persona, and therefore problem at hand?
All of these findings will lead to great insights in the next step of the process.

Step 5: Identify your users’ needs

You should look for the following within your data to identify your users’ needs:

• Verbs—i.e., activities and desires. Mark and analyze any pieces of data that start with a verb as
these are likely to contain or point towards a user need.

• The user traits you noted. Again, mark specific user traits as these will lead towards the true
needs of your users.

• Contradictions and inconsistencies. Once you’ve picked out the users’ traits, you should look for
contradictions and inconsistencies between them. For example, there may be a disconnection
between what a user says and does, or they might show a positive action but portray a negative
emotion through a quote.

What’s more, you should use the American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to
help you understand and define the underlying needs of your users. In 1943, Maslow published his
paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”—in which he proposed that human needs form a hierarchy
that can be visualized in the shape of a pyramid.

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 creativity,
spontaneity,
Self-actualised Needs travelling,
self-growth,

be recognized by others,
Esteem Needs social status, education,
achievements, mastery, prestige

have friends, family, intimacy,

Love/Belonging Needs communities, relationships,
sense of belonging

Safety Needs feel safety, be secure financially, personally,

healthy, protection from the elements

Physiological Needs breathe, eat, drink, have sex, sleep

The Hierarchy of Needs

The largest, most fundamental physiological level of needs features at the bottom, and the need for
self-actualization sits at the top. Maslow suggested that humans must first fulfill their most basic
physiological needs, such as to eat and sleep, before they fulfill higher-level needs such as safety,
love, esteem and finally self-actualization. When a lower level of need is not fulfilled, it is technically
possible to be fulfilled at a higher level. However, Maslow argues that this is an unstable fulfillment.
For example, if you’re starving, it doesn’t matter if you’re the world’s leading user experience
designer, because eventually your hunger is going to overwhelm any satisfaction you get from your
professional status. That’s why we naturally seek to stabilize all lower levels of the hierarchy before
we try to fulfill and retain higher levels.

Consult all five layers in Maslow’s pyramid to help you identify user needs from your empathy map,
and start to define which needs your user is primarily focused on fulfilling. This will enable you to
reflect on how your product or service can help fulfill some of those needs and, ultimately, define
your design challenge.

Make sure to write down your users’ needs as they’ll come in very handy when you want to define
the problem statement of your design challenge (in point of view and how might we activities, for
example).

Every time you do more user research, and observe or talk to someone from the same
persona/segment, you should revise your empathy map and add to or adjust the data it contains to
reflect your updated knowledge.

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 Said Did

Empathy map template

Thought Felt

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Do you want to learn more?
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