What is an empathy map
An empathy map is a visual tool that organizes everything you know about a user into six quadrants. It was created by Dave Gray at XPLANE and popularized by Strategyzer (the same team behind the Business Model Canvas).
Don’t confuse it with a persona. A persona describes who the user is. An empathy map describes what that person lives. The two work together — they don’t compete.
The 6 quadrants (updated version)
The classic version has 4 quadrants (sees, hears, thinks/feels, says/does). The Strategyzer revision adds pains and gains, totaling 6:
1. What they see
Their visual environment — what they look at on the phone when they wake up, on the way to work, in the spaces they spend the day. Includes advertising, people, context.
2. What they hear
What they listen to from friends, colleagues, family, boss, podcasts, social networks. The voices that influence the decision.
3. What they think and feel
What goes through their head but never comes out. Silent frustrations, unspoken dreams, anxieties. The hardest quadrant to fill — requires real research.
4. What they say and do
Observable behavior. What they post on LinkedIn, what they bring up in meetings, which apps they open. The easiest quadrant to fill — just observe.
5. Pains
Obstacles, frustrations, risks they try to avoid. Don’t invent — real research.
6. Gains
What they want to achieve. Not only the stated goal — secondary gains too (status, relief, recognition).
When to use it (and when NOT to)
Use it when:
- You’re at the start of a project and need to align the team on who the user is
- You have qualitative research (interviews, observation) and need to structure insights
- The product has a complex user (B2B with multiple stakeholders)
Don’t use it when:
- You’re guessing. An empathy map filled in from assumptions is worse than no map at all.
- You want to measure volume or market size. That’s a survey, not a map.
- The team is already deeply aligned on the user. A redundant map slows you down.
How to fill it in (step by step)
1. Gather real sources. Audio interviews, call transcripts, support logs, forum posts, App Store reviews. Without a real source, stop here.
2. Define the target user. One map = one specific person (or one archetype, but unique). Don’t try to cover 3 profiles in a single map.
3. Read/listen to everything at once. Tag passages (sees, hears, thinks, feels, does, pain, gain).
4. Put sticky notes in each quadrant. Each tagged passage becomes a note. Don’t summarize — paste the direct quote, the way the person said it.
5. Identify patterns. Which passages repeat across different users? Those are insights. Which appear only once? Those are exceptions (still valuable, but separate them).
6. Synthesize insights. Each quadrant should produce 3 to 5 short, declarative "truths" about the user.
Real example (a doctor subscribing to a financial platform)
To make it concrete, here’s an empathy map we applied in a real case:
- Sees: banking apps open in multiple tabs, hospital WhatsApp messages arriving in real time, a calendar packed with shifts.
- Hears: a consultant saying they need to "get their financial life in order", colleagues complaining that "TUSS takes forever to settle".
- Thinks/feels: "I don’t have time for this", "other doctors don’t talk about money — am I the only one who doesn’t get it?".
- Does: opens the banking app 3x a week, cancels a financial meeting due to an unplanned shift, pays bills in batches (not as they arrive).
- Pains: shame about not understanding finance, end-of-month anxiety, the sense that they earn well but "nothing is left".
- Gains: wants peace of mind about money, doesn’t want to become a trader — just doesn’t want to lose control anymore.
What that map told us: the product can’t look like "fintech" or a "spreadsheet". It has to look like relief. Design decision: the dashboard as the first screen, with balance and monthly projection visible.
The mistake that wastes most teams’ time
Teams fill in empathy maps without interviews. They sit in a room, open the template, and stick notes based on "I think the user feels…". That isn’t an empathy map. It’s a map of what the team imagines.
The result: the team decides based on fiction. Six months later they discover the real user is completely different.
Rule: if you haven’t talked to at least 5 real users, don’t fill in the map. Run the interviews first.
Free template
You can use any tool (Miro, FigJam, paper, Figma). The official Strategyzer template is a PDF available on their site. You don’t need a paid tool to make empathy maps work.
How Otther uses empathy maps in real projects
Empathy maps are one of the first tools we apply when entering a new project — but rarely the first deliverable. The difference matters.
In our methodology, the empathy map is assembled after at least 5 qualitative interviews with real users. Each quadrant receives direct quotes (transcribed from the audio), not the team’s interpretations. When someone at Otther tries to paste "interpretation", the rule is simple: go back to the interview, find the original quote.
That changes what comes out of the map. Instead of "the user feels anxious" (interpretation), we have "looks at the banking app on Friday night, counts what’s left, closes the tab without acting" (behavior). Product decisions are anchored in observable behavior — not in the team’s projection.
That rigor is part of how we deliver discovery and design in projects. When clients want to skip research to "jump straight into Figma", the empathy map is the tool that shows what the team doesn’t know about their own user yet. Usually, it’s more than they imagined.
If you’re starting a product and want to structure discovery the right way, we can help. Even if the goal is just to validate one hypothesis before committing engineering.
To close
An empathy map is a way to organize research, not a substitute for it. Without real sources, it becomes theater. With real sources, it becomes the foundation for product decisions that respect the user instead of pretending to understand them.