Empathy Map Template
Visualize your users' needs to develop better products and services.
About the Empathy Map template
What is an empathy map?
Empathy maps are visualization tools that allow you to articulate what you know about specific types of users. They are often considered a part of the design thinking methodology, and they empower you to create a shared understanding of user needs and help decision-makers with key judgement calls.
UX professionals have a difficult task. They must create products beneficial to users they have never met or interacted with. To do so, it’s important to understand their users and help their colleagues do the same. An empathy map is a powerful tool that helps you do both.
Benefits of empathy mapping
Many businesses employ empathy mapping as part of the design process because it’s helpful in understanding your users, their desires, and what they want out of your product.
Put a narrative to your data
The basis of empathy mapping is typically some firsthand data received from users that describe their thoughts on using the product. One of the major benefits of empathy mapping is that it requires you to tease out more about the customer from this data, determine what they’re feeling, and create a narrative that informs the rest of your UX & UI design.
Get inside the heads of your users
Empathy maps are also a useful exercise because they force you to put yourself in the shoes of your users and determine how they approach and interact with your product. It’s easy for designers to lose sight of real-world user experience with the product, so empathy maps help keep you grounded.
Easily visualize customer needs
Another benefit of empathy mapping is that it’s a visual exercise that distills various pieces of information about the customer experience into a single reference point. Empathy maps can be used and referenced by different stakeholders and team members at various points of the development cycle, and they’re relatively simple to create.
When to use an empathy map
Empathy maps are highly useful whenever your team needs a greater understanding of user needs, such as collaborating on user personas, and building the “user” in your user story.
Empathy maps help you sketch out profiles for a user or persona. They distill your knowledge into a single source of truth. An empathy map can help you summarize and analyze qualitative research such as survey responses and interview transcripts. By putting this information on a single page, you can uncover gaps in your knowledge and figure out how to fill them. Empathy maps are easy-to-use and digestible methods to illustrate user attitudes and behaviors.
The 4 elements of an empathy map
Empathy maps are divided up into four quadrants.
1. Says
The Says quadrant records what a user says during an interview. Try to capture exact quotes, such as, “I use this product every day because it helps me streamline my workflow.”
2. Thinks
In contrast, the Thinks quadrant summarizes what the user is thinking throughout the experience. Based on your qualitative research, ask yourself what occupies the user’s thoughts, what matters to them, and what challenges they’re facing. The key here is to uncover the things they might be too shy or reluctant to share. For example, “This feature is really irritating.”
3. Does
Like the name implies, the Does quadrant captures the actions the user takes. For example, if you’re watching a user interact with a product, you could record the following: “Keeps refreshing the page.”
4. Feels
The Feels quadrant records user emotions. What worries them? What excites them? For example, “The user is excited about the price point. The user is worried that this is too hard to use.”
Create your own
Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your empathy map. Get started by selecting this Empathy Map template. Then divide the map into the four quadrants discussed above and brainstorm different points to add to each section via sticky notes based on the initial customer statement.
Why are empathy maps important?
Empathy maps are important because they give designers an avenue into the mind of the customer and help them empathize with their experience, desires, and needs. They’re also useful for taking insights you gain from user research, digging deeper, and applying them to find concrete solutions.
How do you use persona empathy mapping?
To create an empathy map, start with a direct statement from a customer gleaned from user interviews or direct feedback. From there, you create a constellation of thoughts, feelings, and actions that underly the customer’s statement and help you understand why they made the statement and what their underlying motivations are.
Get started with this template right now. It’s free
Service Blueprint
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Fishbone Diagram
What’s the best way to solve any problem your team faces? Root it out. That means identify the problem’s causes, and fishbone diagrams are designed to help you do it. Also known as Ishikawa Diagram (named after Japanese quality control expert Kaoru Ishikawa), fishbone diagrams empower teams to visualize all possible causes of a problem, to explore and understand how they fit together holistically. Teams can also use fishbone diagrams as a jumping-off point to brainstorm what the root cause could be.
Brainwriting
Brainstorming is such a big part of ideation. But not everyone does their best work out loud and on the spot, yelling out thoughts and building on others’ ideas. Brainwriting is a brilliant solution for them—creative thinkers who happen to be more introverted. This approach and template invites participants to reflect quietly and write out their ideas, and then pass them to someone else who will read the idea and add to it. So you’ll get creative ideas from everyone—not just the loudest few.
Annual Calendar (2021 / 2022)
Plenty of calendars help you focus on the day-to-day deadlines. With this one, it’s all about the big picture. Borrowing from the grid structure of 12-month wall calendars, this template shows you your projects, commitments, and goals one full year at a time. So you and your team can prepare to hunker down during busy periods, move things around as needed, and celebrate your progress. And getting started is so easy—just name your calendar’s color-coded streams and drag stickies onto the start date.
Outcome Mapping
Large, complex projects have plenty of inherent uncertainty — and can have a lot of possible outcomes. How can you be ready for them all? You can anticipate them. Outcome Mapping is a technique that lets you gather information ahead of time to prepare for the many changes and unforeseen obstacles that arise during a project. This template makes it easy for you to conduct Outcome Mapping in four steps: doing your pre-work, providing a framework for monitoring, developing an evaluation plan, and circulating it to your team and stakeholders.
HEART
Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Those are the pillars of user experience — which is why they serve as the key metrics in the HEART framework. Developed by the research team at Google, this framework gives larger companies an accurate way to measure user experience at scale, which you can then reference throughout the product development lifecycle. While the HEART framework uses five metrics, you might not need all five for every project — choose the ones that will be most useful for your company and project.