Empathy Map Template
Dig deeper into your customer's mind with the empathy map template. Visualize all your user needs and develop products people will love.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Empathy Map template
Many businesses and organizations have created an empathy map template to help them understand their audiences, users, and customers. It’s a great tool to gain insights and develop personas or customer segments.
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 judgment calls.
One good empathy map example is how UX professionals use it. 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, so an empathy map is a powerful tool that helps them 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 is the perfect workspace to create and share your empathy map. Get started by selecting this empathy map template. Then fill the four quadrants discussed above and brainstorm different points to add to each section via sticky notes based on the initial customer statement. Or, if you wish, you can create your own empathy map example from scratch, using our diagramming and collaborative features.
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.
How do I create and use an empathy map of my target audience?
You can create an empathy map by conducting user interviews and filling the empathy map template collecting data about how your customers feel about either your product or service. Ideally, it would be best to do an empathy map with your target audience to have data about who they are and how they interact with your product. People use the empathy map to improve product features and discover where the product or service falls short.
Get started with this template right now.
Prioritized Product Roadmap
Works best for:
Roadmap, Mapping, Planning
The Prioritized Product Roadmap template enables teams to focus on delivering the most valuable features to customers. By prioritizing initiatives based on impact and effort, teams can maximize the return on investment and drive business value. This template fosters collaboration and alignment, ensuring that development efforts are aligned with strategic objectives and customer needs.
Product Inception Canvas
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Inception Canvas template facilitates collaborative sessions for defining product visions and strategies. By exploring product goals, user needs, and market opportunities, this template aligns teams around a shared vision. With sections for defining product features, prioritizing initiatives, and setting success criteria, it provides a structured framework for product inception. This template serves as a launchpad for innovative product ideas, guiding teams through the initial stages of product development and setting the foundation for success.
App Development Canvas Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Product Management, User Experience
Ever noticed that building a successful app requires lots of players and moving parts? If you’re a project manager, you definitely have. Lucky for you, an app development canvas will let you own and optimize the entire process. It features 18 boxes, each one focusing on a key aspect of app development, giving you a big-picture view. That way you can fine-tune processes and get ahead of potential problems along the way—resulting in a smoother path and a better, tighter product.
Job Map Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Mapping
Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.
Cone Roadmap
Works best for:
Roadmap, Planning, Mapping
The Cone Roadmap template offers a visual representation of project timelines and dependencies, with a focus on narrowing scope over time. By starting with broad initiatives and gradually refining them into actionable tasks, teams can manage complexity and ensure alignment with strategic goals. This template promotes transparency and adaptability, empowering teams to respond effectively to changing priorities and market dynamics.
Stakeholder Mapping Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Mapping, Workflows
A stakeholder map is a type of analysis that allows you to group people by their power and interest. Use this template to organize all of the people who have an interest in your product, project, or idea in a single visual space. This allows you to easily see who can influence your project, and how each person is related to the other. Widely used in project management, stakeholder mapping is typically performed at the beginning of a project. Doing stakeholder mapping early on will help prevent miscommunication, ensure all groups are aligned on the objectives and set expectations about outcomes and results.