A product team spends three months building a feature. They launch it. Nobody uses it. The problem was never the code or the design. The team simply did not understand what their users actually needed.
An empathy map is a collaborative visualization tool that organizes what a team knows about a user into four quadrants: Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels. Dave Gray, founder of the consulting firm XPLANE, originally created this framework to help teams build shared understanding during human-centered design workshops.
Most product teams struggle with the same challenge. They design based on assumptions instead of real user insight. This leads to misaligned features, wasted development cycles, and products that miss the mark. Empathy maps solve this by forcing teams to organize research into a single, visual artifact that everyone can reference.
This guide covers the four quadrants of an empathy map, a step-by-step creation process, and how modern AI-powered design tools like Visily make empathy mapping accessible to anyone on the team.
Why Empathy Maps Matter in Product Design
Now that the definition is clear, the next question is why teams should invest time in creating one. Empathy maps deliver practical value across the entire product development process.
- They reduce guesswork in product and design decisions.
- They align cross-functional teams around a single view of the user.
- They turn qualitative research into a scannable visual format.
- They reveal gaps in user knowledge that need further investigation.
- They speed up early-stage ideation and feature prioritization.
These benefits matter most for modern product teams. Remote, cross-functional groups need shared reference points. Product managers, developers, founders, and business analysts all bring different perspectives to the table. An empathy map gives them a common language. Teams that value speed over pixel-perfection in early stages get the most out of this tool.
What Are The Four Quadrants of an Empathy Map?
Every empathy map is divided into four quadrants arranged around a central user persona. Each quadrant captures a different dimension of that user’s experience. Together, they create a complete picture of how someone interacts with a product or service.
Says
The Says quadrant captures direct quotes and statements from users. These are things people say aloud during interviews, usability tests, or support conversations. Use their exact words whenever possible.
- “What did the user say about their biggest frustration?”
- “What exact words did they use to describe the product?”
Direct quotes carry more weight than paraphrased summaries. They keep the team grounded in real language rather than interpreted meaning.
Thinks
The Thinks quadrant records what the user is likely thinking but may not express directly. These are inferred beliefs, concerns, and internal narratives. This quadrant captures subtext, not surface-level statements.
- “What worries might the user have but not voice?”
- “What assumptions does the user hold about how things should work?”
The gap between what users say and what they think often holds the most valuable insights.
Does
The Does quadrant documents observable user actions and behaviors. This is what people physically do when interacting with a product or completing a task. Focus on actions, not intentions.
- “What steps does the user take to complete the task?”
- “What workarounds has the user created?”
Behavioral data is harder to fake than verbal feedback. What users do often tells a different story than what they say.
Feels
The Feels quadrant captures the user’s emotional state. Frustrations, anxieties, excitement, confusion, and confidence all belong here. This quadrant is often the most revealing for identifying pain points.
- “What frustrates the user most about this process?”
- “What makes the user feel confident or anxious?”
Emotions drive decisions. A user might complete a task successfully but still feel frustrated by the experience. That frustration matters.
The four quadrants work together as a system. Contradictions between them are where the richest insights live. A user who says they are satisfied but behaves in ways that suggest frustration is telling you something important. Those mismatches deserve attention.
6 Key Steps to Create an Empathy Map
Creating an empathy map is a structured but flexible process. Most teams can complete one in 20 to 60 minutes with the right preparation and research inputs.
Step 1: Define Your User or Persona
The team must agree on who the empathy map is about. This could be a specific user persona, a customer segment, or a real person from recent research. Write the user’s name or label in the center of the map. Everyone on the team should have the same person in mind.
Step 2: Gather Your Research
Collect your inputs before the session starts. Useful sources include user interview transcripts, survey responses, support tickets, usability test recordings, analytics data, and sales call notes. Empathy maps work best when grounded in real data. Assumptions belong on a separate list, not in the quadrants.
Step 3: Draw the Four-Quadrant Framework
Set up a large canvas divided into four sections labeled Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels. Place the user or persona in the center. This can be done on a physical whiteboard with sticky notes or on a digital design tool. Teams using a browser-based platform can start with pre-built design templates and customize the layout in minutes.
Step 4: Fill Each Quadrant Collaboratively
This is the core activity. Each team member adds observations to the relevant quadrant based on the research gathered in Step 2. Use direct quotes for Says. Record behavioral observations for Does. Add inferred thoughts for Thinks. Place emotional descriptors in Feels. This should be a team exercise. One person’s interpretation is not enough. Multiple perspectives reduce bias and surface insights that a single reviewer would miss.
Step 5: Identify Patterns and Contradictions
After filling the quadrants, the team reviews everything together. Look for recurring themes across quadrants. Pay special attention to contradictions. A user who says one thing but does another is revealing a gap between expectation and reality. Also note empty areas. Gaps in a quadrant indicate where more research is needed.
Step 6: Summarize Insights and Define Next Steps
Translate the empathy map into actionable outcomes. These might include revised user stories, updated personas, design hypotheses, or a reprioritized feature backlog. The empathy map is not a final deliverable. It is an input to better decisions. The real value comes from what the team does with the insights.
Templates can speed up this entire process significantly, especially for teams running their first empathy mapping session.
Empathy Map Templates and Examples
Empathy maps come in several formats. The right template depends on the team’s goals and the depth of available research.
Basic Four-Quadrant Map. This is the standard format described above. Four sections, one user in the center. It works best for quick workshops and early-stage ideation when the team needs a fast, shared understanding of the user.
Extended Empathy Map with Goals and Pains. This version adds two additional sections below the quadrants. Goals capture what the user is trying to achieve. Pains capture what stands in their way. This format is useful when the team needs to connect emotional insights directly to user objectives and frustrations.
Multi-User or Segment Map. This format creates side-by-side empathy maps for different personas or customer segments. It helps teams compare experiences and prioritize which user group to focus on first.
Here is a brief example of a filled empathy map for a first-time mobile banking user:
| Quadrant | Sample Entry |
| Says | “I don’t know where to find my account balance.” |
| Thinks | “This app looks complicated. I hope I don’t make a mistake.” |
| Does | Taps multiple menu items before finding the right screen. |
| Feels | Anxious about security. Frustrated by unfamiliar navigation. |
Teams can start with a pre-built template on a digital canvas and customize it collaboratively in real time. AI-powered platforms like Visily offer a text to diagram feature that generates structured visual frameworks from plain text descriptions, making it possible to set up an empathy map layout in seconds rather than minutes.
Empathy Map vs. User Persona: What’s the Difference?
Empathy maps and user personas are complementary tools, not interchangeable ones. A persona answers the question “Who is the user?” An empathy map answers “What is the user experiencing?”
A user persona is a fictional profile that summarizes a user segment’s demographics, goals, and behaviors. An empathy map is a real-time workshop tool that captures what a specific user says, thinks, does, and feels during a particular experience.
| Dimension | User Persona | Empathy Map |
| Purpose | Define a user archetype | Explore a user’s lived experience |
| Format | Static document or profile card | Collaborative workshop canvas |
| Data type | Demographics, goals, behaviors | Quotes, thoughts, actions, emotions |
| Best used | Throughout the product lifecycle | During research synthesis and ideation |
Many teams create a persona first, then build an empathy map for that persona to go deeper. Both tools feed into better product decisions, and using them together gives a more complete picture of the user.
Empathy Map vs. Customer Journey Map
An empathy map captures depth at a single moment. A customer journey map captures breadth across an entire experience. They serve different purposes, and understanding the distinction helps teams choose the right tool for the job.
A customer journey map is a visual timeline that traces a user’s experience across multiple stages and touchpoints over time. It shows how a user moves from awareness to consideration to decision and beyond.
| Dimension | Empathy Map | Customer Journey Map |
| Scope | Single moment or context | Full experience over time |
| Structure | Four quadrants | Timeline with stages and touchpoints |
| Focus | Internal user experience | External interactions with product or service |
| Complexity | Simple and quick to create | More detailed, requires more data |
Many teams use both tools together. An empathy map helps the team understand the user at one critical stage. A journey map shows how that stage fits into the larger experience. They are complementary parts of a user-centered design process.
How to Use Empathy Maps in Agile and Product Teams
Empathy maps are not just a design exercise. They are a practical alignment tool for any team building products. Their simplicity makes them easy to integrate into existing workflows without adding overhead.
- Sprint planning. Product managers use empathy maps to write better user stories. Stories grounded in real user emotions and behaviors are more specific and more useful than generic requirements.
- Feature prioritization. Teams reference empathy maps to evaluate which features address the most critical user pain points. This prevents the backlog from being driven by internal opinions alone.
- Remote team alignment. Distributed teams use digital empathy maps as a shared reference point during async collaboration. A real-time collaboration tool lets multiple team members contribute to the same canvas from different locations.
- Stakeholder communication. Founders and product managers present empathy maps to stakeholders to justify design decisions with user evidence rather than gut feelings.
Research from the Interaction Design Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization focused on UX design, shows that teams using structured empathy exercises during the design process report higher confidence in their product decisions and fewer mid-sprint scope changes.
Digital tools make it easy to create, share, and iterate on empathy maps. This is especially true for teams without dedicated designers on staff.
How to Build an Empathy Map with Visily AI
Visily offers a ready-made User Empathy Map Template that saves you from building the canvas from scratch. Here’s the workflow straight from Visily’s template page: click “Use this Template” to begin, sign up for a free Visily account to unlock full customization, then fill in and customize your empathy map by defining your target user, populating the Says/Does/Thinks/Feels quadrants with research data, identifying pain points and opportunities, and customizing colors and styles to match your brand.
Direct link to the template: visily.ai/templates/user-empathy-map-template
Step-by-step process of Empathy Mapping with Visily
1. Prepare before you open Visily
An empathy map is only as good as the research behind it. Decide which user segment the empathy map will focus on (one user type, one specific context), then gather your qualitative inputs: interview transcripts, observation notes, usability test recordings, and survey data. If you skip this step you’ll end up documenting assumptions rather than insights.
2. Open the template in Visily
From the template page, click “Use this Template,” which drops you into Visily’s canvas with a pre-built four-quadrant structure and a central user area. If you prefer to build from scratch, you can open a blank project and use Visily’s sticky notes, shapes, and text tools on the digital whiteboard to construct the four quadrants yourself.
3. Fill in the four quadrants
The classic empathy map has four sections around a central user persona:
- Says — direct quotes from your interviews. This quadrant contains verbatim statements the user said out loud during research, like “I always shop around before committing to a tool.”
- Thinks — what’s going through their mind that they may not say aloud (doubts, worries, aspirations).
- Does — observable actions and behaviors (the steps they actually take, not what they claim to do).
- Feels — emotional state (frustrated, excited, overwhelmed, uncertain).
Use Visily’s sticky notes for individual data points so you can cluster and rearrange them as patterns emerge. Color-code by source (e.g., blue for interview A, yellow for interview B) to keep traceability.
4. Consider the updated 6-part version
If the 4-quadrant view feels too thin, the newer version by Dave Gray adds more dimensions. The updated empathy map canvas is divided into six areas: Goals, Sees, Says, Does, Hears, and Thinks & Feels. You can easily modify Visily’s template to add Sees (their environment, competitor products, ads) and Hears (what colleagues, friends, influencers tell them) as extra quadrants. Some teams also add sections for Goals and Pains.
5. Identify pain points and opportunities
Once the quadrants are populated, step back and look for contradictions — places where what users say doesn’t match what they do, or where their feelings clash with their stated thinks. These gaps are usually where your best product opportunities hide. Add a dedicated “Insights & Opportunities” section below or beside the map to capture these.
6. Collaborate and iterate
One of Visily’s strengths here is real-time collaboration. You can invite team members and stakeholders to view, edit, and comment on the map, which lets you gather diverse perspectives and surface pain points you may have overlooked. Run a workshop where researchers, designers, PMs, and even support/sales add sticky notes — each lens tends to catch things the others miss.
Practical tips for Visily specifically
- Use sticky notes, not text boxes for individual observations — they’re easier to move, cluster, and color-code as patterns emerge.
- Leverage smart components to drop in representative UI screenshots of your product into the “Sees” section, making it concrete what users actually encounter.
- Link related artifacts — since you can create user journey maps and personas in the same Visily workspace, connect your empathy map to them so your research ecosystem stays navigable. Patterns across multiple empathy maps often become the foundation for personas.
- Keep it alive — revisit the map after each new research round. An empathy map that hasn’t been updated in 6 months is probably lying to you.
Frequently Asked Questions About Empathy Maps
Who invented the empathy map?
Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, created the empathy map as a tool for human-centered design workshops. The framework gained wider adoption through the design thinking methodology and is now used across UX, product management, and business strategy.
How long does it take to create an empathy map?
A basic empathy map can be completed in 20 to 30 minutes during a team workshop. More detailed versions with extensive research inputs may take 45 to 60 minutes. Digital tools with ready-made templates can cut setup time to just a few minutes.
Can you create an empathy map alone?
Yes, but empathy maps are most effective as a collaborative exercise. A single person can fill one out based on research data. However, team-based sessions surface more diverse perspectives and reduce individual bias in how the data is interpreted.
What data do you need for an empathy map?
Empathy maps work best with qualitative data. Useful sources include user interview transcripts, usability test observations, open-ended survey responses, support ticket themes, and sales call notes. Even informal conversations with users can provide useful input.
How is an empathy map used in design thinking?
In design thinking, empathy maps are used during the Empathize phase. They help teams organize raw user research into a shared visual format. The insights from the map then inform the Define and Ideate phases, where the team frames the problem and generates solutions.
Are empathy maps still relevant in 2026?
Yes. Empathy maps remain one of the most widely used UX research tools. Their simplicity, speed, and adaptability to digital and remote workflows keep them practical for modern teams. The rise of AI-powered design platforms has made them even more accessible to non-designers and cross-functional product teams.
