A customer empathy map is a simple visual tool that helps teams understand how their customers think, feel, speak, and behave. Its core purpose is to move a team beyond assumptions about who their customer is and build a shared, human-centered picture of that person’s actual experience. Originally developed at the design consultancy XPLANE and published by founder Dave Gray in the 2010 book “Gamestorming,” the empathy map has become one of the most widely used frameworks in product design, marketing, and user experience work.
What Problem the Empathy Map Solves
Most teams think they know their customer, but different people on the same team often hold very different mental models of who that customer is. A developer might picture a tech-savvy power user. A marketer might picture a first-time buyer who needs hand-holding. A support lead might picture someone frustrated with a recurring bug. None of them are wrong, but none of them have the full picture either.
The empathy map forces everyone into one room (or one shared document) to synthesize what they actually know about the customer into a single framework. As XPLANE describes it, the tool puts “a human-centered framework around co-creating a better picture of who we’re talking to when we design products, services, and experiences for people.” The result is alignment. Instead of each department designing for a slightly different person, the whole team works from one portrait grounded in real observations.
The Four Quadrants
A standard empathy map is divided into four sections, with a representation of the customer or persona in the center. Each quadrant captures a different dimension of the customer’s experience.
- Says: What the customer says out loud, ideally captured as direct quotes from interviews, surveys, or usability studies. For example, “I can never find the return policy on this site.” Verbatim language is more useful than paraphrasing because it preserves tone, frustration, and specificity.
- Thinks: What the customer is thinking but may not vocalize. This is where you capture unspoken motivations, doubts, or internal questions. A customer might say “This product looks great” while thinking “I’m not sure I can justify the price.” The gap between Says and Thinks is often where the most valuable insights live.
- Does: What the customer physically does. This covers observable behaviors: how they navigate a website, where they click, whether they comparison-shop across tabs, how they use a product after buying it. Actions often reveal priorities that words don’t.
- Feels: The customer’s emotional state during the experience, usually expressed as an adjective with a short phrase for context. “Anxious because the checkout process asks for too much personal information” is more useful than just writing “anxious.” Emotions drive decisions, so this quadrant often explains why the other three quadrants look the way they do.
Some versions of the map add sections for “Pains” and “Gains” below the four quadrants, capturing what the customer is trying to avoid and what they hope to achieve. These additions help bridge the empathy map into product strategy by connecting the customer’s emotional world to concrete design opportunities.
How Teams Use Empathy Maps
The most common application is during the early stages of product design or redesign. A team gathers qualitative research (interview transcripts, usability test recordings, customer support logs, survey responses) and uses it to populate the four quadrants collaboratively. The exercise typically takes 30 to 60 minutes per persona and works best as a group activity rather than something one person fills out alone.
In product development, the map helps prioritize features. If your empathy map reveals that customers feel overwhelmed by too many options during onboarding, that’s a signal to simplify rather than add more functionality. In marketing, the map shapes messaging. If the Thinks quadrant shows customers worry about hidden fees, your landing page copy can address that concern directly. In customer support, the map helps agents understand the emotional context behind a complaint, not just the technical issue.
Empathy maps also work well as a complement to personas. A persona gives you demographic details and a narrative backstory. An empathy map zooms into a specific moment or experience and asks: what is this person actually going through right now? You can create multiple empathy maps for the same persona, one for each stage of their journey with your product.
What Makes an Empathy Map Useful
The quality of an empathy map depends entirely on the quality of the data behind it. A map built from real customer research, direct quotes from interviews, observed behaviors from usability tests, and documented emotional reactions from support interactions, will surface genuine insights. A map built from a team’s guesses in a conference room will only confirm existing assumptions.
The Says quadrant is a good test of whether your map is grounded in reality. If you can’t fill it with actual quotes, you probably don’t have enough research yet. The Thinks quadrant, by contrast, always involves some inference, but it should be inference rooted in behavioral evidence rather than speculation. A customer who abandons their cart three times before purchasing is probably thinking something specific. Your job is to figure out what, using the clues in the other quadrants.
One of the most valuable things the empathy map does is expose contradictions. When what a customer says doesn’t match what they do, that gap is a signal worth investigating. Someone might say they want more product options while consistently choosing the simplest one. That kind of disconnect often points toward a deeper, unmet need that wouldn’t surface from survey data alone.
When to Create One
Empathy maps are most useful at moments when a team needs to make decisions about people: launching a new product, redesigning an experience, entering a new market, or rethinking a communication strategy. They’re lightweight enough to create in a single working session, which makes them practical even for teams without a dedicated research budget.
You can also use them retroactively. If a product launch underperformed or a campaign fell flat, building an empathy map from post-launch customer feedback can help a team understand what they missed. The exercise of sorting real customer input into Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels often reveals blind spots that aggregate metrics like conversion rates or NPS scores can’t explain on their own.
The tool works for any team that serves people, not just product designers. Sales teams use empathy maps to understand buyer hesitation. Content teams use them to figure out what questions their audience is actually asking. HR teams use them to understand the employee experience during organizational changes. The format is the same; only the “customer” in the center changes.