Empathy Map
An empathy map is a one-page picture of what a team knows about one person in one specific situation. It sorts that knowledge into zones: what the person says, thinks, does and feels. Dave Gray designed it with his team at XPLANE. He revised it in 2017. The team fills in the map with what it has observed, heard or imagined. An empty zone shows what the team does not yet know.
Purpose
The empathy map describes a person from that person's own point of view. It addresses a design problem: each department works from a picture of the customer that nobody has written down.
For Sarah Gibbons (Nielsen Norman Group), the map builds a shared understanding of the user's needs and supports decisions. Departments that fill in the map together compare their versions of the customer and come out with one. The map then helps them choose which need to address first. During the project, the team checks every claim about the user against the map.
The map also shows the team what it does not know about the person. Dave Gray notes this in his original description. Gibbons turns it into a test. A zone that the team cannot fill signals that the team needs more research before it designs. That zone names the question for the next interview.
Usage
When to use it
- Start of a design project: align the team on the user before it writes the requirements.
- Analysing interviews: sort the notes from an interview or a diary study by zone.
- Departments that disagree about the customer: the map sets the versions of customer service, marketing and IT side by side.
- Building a persona: merge the individual maps of similar users into one segment map.
- Presenting a persona: the map shows on one page what the team knows about the persona.
- Understanding a stakeholder: one map for the partner, the prospect or the executive the project depends on.
- Planning research: the empty zones name the questions for the next interview or observation.
When not to use it
- A multi-step experience: the map has no time axis. Use a customer journey map instead.
- A decision that needs figures (share of customers, frequency of a problem): use a survey or questionnaire instead.
Description
Dave Gray's method and its versions
Dave Gray and his team designed the empathy map at XPLANE. It is part of the Gamestorming toolkit for human-centred design. Alexander Osterwalder adopted it in Business Model Generation to understand customers. That book presents the business model canvas.
Gray's map starts from what the team knows and imagines about the person. Gray estimates that a rough map takes about twenty minutes when the team already knows the person and the situation well. The Nielsen Norman Group builds the map from research.
Three versions circulate. Their zones differ. The original map draws the profile of a head and divides it into five zones: what the person thinks, feels, says, does and hears. Gibbons describes the form that she calls traditional: four quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, Feels) around the user. In 2017 Gray published a revised canvas. He had found that the versions copied across the web had lost part of the original idea. While creating the Culture Map with Osterwalder, he had learned how a canvas works. He applied that lesson to the empathy map.
| Version | Starting point | Zones |
|---|---|---|
| Original map (Gray's procedure) | A named person, their job and a question | Thinks, Feels, Says, Does, Hears |
| Four quadrants (Nielsen Norman Group) | A user or a persona | Says, Thinks, Does, Feels |
| 2017 canvas (Gray) | The person and what they must do differently | Sees, Says, Does, Hears, then Thinks and feels: pains and gains |
The 2017 canvas starts with the goal. The team writes down whom it wants to understand and what that person must do differently: the task to carry out, the decision to make, the sign of success. The Sees, Says, Does and Hears zones then describe the person's outside world. In Says and Does, the canvas asks what the team has observed and what it imagines. The Thinks and feels zone fills the inside of the head. It splits into pains (fears, frustrations, anxieties) and gains (wants, needs, hopes). A third line asks which other thoughts and feelings drive the person's behaviour. Each zone carries a number. The numbers fix the order in which the team fills in the zones.
Two places on the 2017 canvas deal with what the person does. In the Goal band, the Must do box states what the person must do differently. The Does zone records what the person does today. The team states on the map which version it uses. On a map that mixes two versions, each member fills in the zones by a different logic.
What each zone holds
Gibbons defines the four quadrants from research. Gray adds two zones: Sees and Hears. He defines them by the questions on his canvas.
- Says: what the person says aloud in an interview or a test. Quotations fit this quadrant best: "I want something reliable."
- Thinks: what the person thinks during the experience. This includes above all what they keep to themselves. The team looks for the reason they hold it back: doubt, embarrassment, politeness, fear.
- Does: the actions that the research observed. The person reloads the page several times. They compare prices from one site to another.
- Feels: the emotional state, written as an adjective with a short phrase of context. "Impatient: the pages load slowly."
- Hears: what colleagues, friends and superiors tell the person, then what the person learns second hand.
- Sees: the person's immediate surroundings, what others do, what the person reads and watches.
Thinks and Feels are hard to tell apart. Gibbons advises the team not to dwell on it: a note that fits two zones goes in either one. The zones only make sure that the team covers every dimension of the person.
Contradictions between zones teach the team the most. A user says they are satisfied and acts like a customer about to leave. Gibbons asks the team to look for the cause. The team traces each note back to its source. It puts the contradiction to the person in the next interview.
Individual map or segment map
An individual map describes one person from an interview or a diary. A segment map combines the individual maps of users who behave alike. It brings out the themes that the group shares. Gibbons sees it as a first step towards a persona. The map does not replace the persona. The map of an existing persona shows what the team knows about that persona. It replaces the usual portrait in business-card format. A map carries one user, one segment or one persona. A team with three personas draws three maps.
Building the map
The procedure follows Gibbons. Steps 1, 3 and 5 also draw on Gray.
- Set the person and the question. The team chooses a user, a persona or a role. It frames the situation to understand as a question. Gray's example is a purchase decision: "Why should I buy X?" In the 2017 canvas, the team also writes what the person must do differently and how the team will know that the person has succeeded. Finally the team sets the purpose of the exercise. To align the team, the whole team must fill in the map. To analyse interviews, the team sets a time per interview in advance.
- Gather the research. Gibbons bases the map on qualitative research: interviews, field observation, diaries, questionnaires with open answers. Without research, the team follows Gray and maps what it knows and imagines. It then marks every note as a hypothesis.
- Fill in individually. Each member reads the research alone. Each writes one sticky note per observation and places it in its zone. This solo work stops the first voice in the room from fixing the map. Gray asks the team to note what the person actually sees, hears and experiences. He warns against one failing: putting your own words in the person's mouth.
- Cluster and name. The team clusters similar notes within each zone and names each cluster. It then discusses the isolated notes, the themes present in every zone and the themes found in only one. It records the gaps. This clustering follows the logic of the affinity map.
- Have it reviewed. Gray asks other people to review the map, to suggest corrections and to add detail or context.
- Date it and keep it current. The version in circulation names the person, the open questions, the date and a version number. The 2017 canvas reserves fields for this information. When new research arrives, the team revisits the map and removes what the research has disproved.
Pitfalls
The assumption presented as fact. Gray invites the team to imagine what the person says and does. Gibbons accepts that a team may sketch a map without research. These maps mix hypotheses and observations. Without a marker, the reader cannot tell them apart. Our practice: every note carries its source (interview, call log, observation). The team marks every note without a source as a hypothesis. This marker also guards against the failing that Gray names: the team attributes its own opinions to the person. That happens most in Thinks and Feels.
The zone filled for the sake of filling it. An empty zone is a result. It says which question to ask in the next interview. A team that fills it with assumptions erases that signal.
Several people on one map. A map that mixes two customer segments puts unrelated quotations side by side. The contradictions it shows no longer mean anything.
The smoothed map. A team that removes the contradictory notes to get a coherent portrait removes what the map was meant to show.
The frozen map. A map that nobody dates becomes a false description of the customer without anyone noticing. Gibbons asks the team to revisit it with each new round of research.
Empathy map, persona and customer journey map
The empathy map has no time axis. Gibbons describes it as a view of the person as a whole. The customer journey map follows the same person phase by phase with their actions, thoughts and emotions. The two complement each other. The persona gathers the traits of a segment into one portrait. The empathy map can prepare the persona or present it.
AI considerations
A language model speeds up the analysis. It sorts the passages of an interview transcript by zone and cites the source line for each one. It flags contradictions between what the person says and what the call log shows the person does. It clusters the notes of several individual maps into themes before the segment map. For a Swiss organisation, it translates quotations collected in French, German or Italian into the team's working language. From the empty zones, it drafts the questions for the next interview guide.
The team does not let the model fill in the map without research. A model given a description of a persona produces plausible quotations and stock emotions. Gray calls this putting your own words in the person's mouth. Such a map no longer has an empty zone and so no longer has a signal. The team keeps the interpretation of Thinks and Feels for itself. That interpretation requires having heard the person. A translated quotation appears on the map with its original version. Transcripts contain personal data. Before the team hands them to an external service, it anonymises them and checks that the transfer complies with the Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP).
Examples
A health insurer in French-speaking Switzerland receives complaints about physiotherapy reimbursement. The team draws the map of one policyholder from an interview, the call log and the customer portal log. A contradiction between two zones points to the problem.
Basic insurance (LAMal)
Sandrine is telling the truth. She sent back everything she thought was missing, because the refusal letter names no document. Only the portal message names the new prescription. Sandrine does not open the portal. The fault therefore lies in the refusal letter.
Visualisations
A segment map takes the same form as an individual map. Each note shows how many people the team found it in. In every form, a colour or a marker per source separates observations from hypotheses. A line links two notes that contradict each other.
Cost
| Phase | Level | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Preparation | Medium | Set the person and the question, gather the interviews and observations; conduct the missing ones. |
| Execution | Low | About twenty minutes for a rough map. A session of one to two hours for a map drawn from research. |
| Documentation | Low | One dated and versioned page. The team revisits it when new research arrives. |
Tooling
A whiteboard, sticky notes and markers are enough in the room. The team sees the clusters form and moves them. Gray publishes his 2017 canvas as a PDF. For a team spread across several sites, a digital whiteboard such as Miro or Mural plays the same role and keeps the map accessible after the workshop.
A spreadsheet helps the team analyse several interviews: one row per note with its zone, its source and the person concerned. A filter by person produces the individual maps. A filter by zone prepares the segment map.
Sources
The empathy map comes from Dave Gray and his team at XPLANE. No professional body describes it in a standard. The Nielsen Norman Group is a user experience consultancy. It describes the practice of the research-based map.
- Dave Gray, "Empathy Map", Gamestorming: the purpose of the exercise, the original five-step procedure, the five zones of the map, the time for a rough map and its adoption by Osterwalder.
- Dave Gray, "Update to the Empathy Map", Gamestorming, 2017: the design of the map at XPLANE, the reasons for the revision and the 2017 canvas with its numbered zones, the goal, the pains and the gains.
- Sarah Gibbons, "Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking", Nielsen Norman Group, 2018: the definition, the four quadrants, individual and segment maps, the six-step procedure and the empty-zone test.