Customer empathy map: how to understand users and improve your product

To build a truly successful product, design teams need to step into their clients’ shoes — capture their unspoken needs, motivations, and pain points. Do you want to transform abstract data into tangible insights? Are you trying to get a better grasp of your target group? This is where an empathy map comes into the picture. We will guide you through the mapping process, benefits, and strategic application. So let’s not wait any longer and start with the essentials!

What is an empathy map?

Far from a static document, an empathy map is a dynamic research artifact that breathes life into your personas and drives informed decision-making throughout the entire project lifecycle. To understand what an empathy map is in design, we must look at its structure. 

Basically, it’s a collaborative visualization tool designed to articulate what a group learned about a specific audience segment. In human-centered design, it’s a powerful way to reveal attitudes, motivations, and frustrations that basic research notes may not always capture. 

At its core, an empathy map UX serves as a graphical representation that helps to internalize consumer perspectives. Simply put, by making research findings public, experts create a shared reference point that keeps discussions and decisions on the same page. 

“The more deeply you know your users, the more effectively you can solve their problems.”

This map acts as a bridge between raw data — gathered from interviews, observations, and field studies — and actionable insights that inform design and development. The aim is not to collect isolated traits but to combine them into an integrated view that supports meaningful solutions.

Why should my business invest in a custom empathy map?

It might seem that creating a custom empathy map for your product is time-consuming and costly. However, it’s more than a documentation exercise. Let’s call it an investment in more detailed user insights that directly translate into better product-market fit and improved user satisfaction. 

A detailed map equals clarity on the client’s needs. Otherwise, they will remain hidden and lead to costly assumptions and rework later in the development cycle. This process helps bring your users’ insights out into the open and organize them, so everyone, from designers to developers to marketers, is on the same page. Being on the same page results in decisions that truly resonate with your audience. Remember that delighted users don’t come from product core features alone. 

These insights don’t exist in isolation — they feed directly into your broader product design strategy. If you’re refining flows, validating features, or rethinking the entire experience, understanding your users at this depth becomes the foundation of effective UI/UX design.

Furthermore, a custom map helps identify areas where your product can provide unique value, distinguishing you from competitors. It grounds your product strategy in real user experiences, making it a powerful asset for growth and innovation.

The key parts of a customer empathy map

The empathy map usually includes four main quadrants. Each one represents a different aspect of the person’s experience behind UI/UX design that converts. They let practitioners sort and interpret observations in a way that paints a full, holistic view of the person. So, given how important each section is, let’s take a closer look at them.

Says

Section “Says” captures everything the respondent shares during interviews, observations, or feedback sessions. It includes explicit statements and direct quotes that reveal their opinions, frustrations, desires, and experiences. Here, you should focus on transcribing exact phrases rather than paraphrasing. The precise wording often carries significant meaning and tone. This ensures the subject’s perspective is represented exactly as they expressed it, without any interpretation.

Thinks

Section “Thinks” uncovers what the person is thinking or worrying about, including their unspoken thoughts, beliefs, and internal monologues. “How do I know what people think?” you might ask. Of course, these inferred thoughts, assumptions, and motivations might not be openly expressed, but you can still notice them. Pay attention to individuals’ body language, context, and responses to indirect questions.  You should try to understand the thought processes and mental models that guide their actions.

Does

Section “Does” requires attention to the person’s actions, behaviors, and habits in relevant situations. It is yet again about being attentive. Notice how individuals interact with goods or services, their daily routines, and their physical behaviors. This could involve clicking patterns, navigation choices, tasks performed, or even non-verbal actions observed during consumer research. Overall, you should focus on real actions and interactions you can see and measure.

Feels

Section “Feels,” as you might already have guessed, captures a person’s emotions, moods, and underlying motivations. Here, you must connect with your clients on a deeper emotional level — whether they feel frustrated, happy, anxious, excited, bored, or confused. This way, you connect the dots between the emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. When you do it, you realize what delights or frustrates the audience.

Benefits and weaknesses of empathy mapping

While empathy mapping is a powerful tool for consumer research and design thinking, it’s essential to pay attention to both its strengths and limitations. Doing it ensures that your efforts yield the most valuable insights for your project.

Benefits

Among the benefits of empathy mapping are user-centered insights, better team alignment, identification of opportunities for innovation, and a better understanding of customer needs. They help you build a solid foundation for human-focused design. Let’s take a closer look at these advantages:

• User-centered insights. Visualizations help put people’s voices and experiences front and center, turning their perspectives into something you can really see and understand. When you explore what individuals say, think, do, and feel, teams gain meaningful insights that numbers alone can’t show. This process allows for a profound appreciation of the individual’s world, their daily struggles, and their aspirations, so you can create a truly personalized user experience.
• Better team alignment. When a diverse crew collaborates on a UX empathy mapping session, it fosters a shared view of the target persona. This process helps remove barriers between teams, reduce ambiguity, clarify objectives, and streamline communication.
• Identifying opportunities for innovation. By systematically exploring buyer pain points, unmet needs, and desires, you notice gaps in existing solutions or receive entirely new possibilities for innovation. When specialists thoroughly analyze what a customer feels or thinks, they can pinpoint areas where a novel feature could have a significant impact.
• Deeper understanding of customer needs. With a well-structured empathy mapping, staff can move past superficial observations to the underlying motivations behind clients’ behaviors. This closer look into a person’s mindset provides a complete picture, helping teams notice not only what consumers do but also the reasons behind their actions. To gain fuller insights into users, consider incorporating in-depth interviews.

Weaknesses

Even with all its benefits, the mapping process still comes with a few possible drawbacks. It’s time for you to learn them, too:

• Making assumptions instead of validating. One of the biggest risks in the empathy mapping exercise is filling the layout with what the group thinks they know about individuals, rather than actual research data. Without genuine inquiry, like interviews, observations, or field studies, the schematic becomes a reflection of internal biases and assumptions. The result? Misleading insights and ultimately, flawed design decisions.

“Your customer’s empathy map should be a synthesis of evidence instead of conjecture.”

• Forgetting emotional depth. While the “Feels” quadrant specifically addresses emotions, it’s easy to overlook the true emotional impact of human experiences. Creators might focus too much on functional aspects and forget to capture the nuances of frustration, delight, anxiety, or relief. Neglecting this emotional depth can lead to software that is functionally sound but emotionally disconnected from people.
• Treating the map as a one-time exercise. A user profile is a living document, not a static artifact. Client needs, market conditions, and solution features evolve. Treating this activity as a single, isolated task means missing out on continuous learning and adaptation. Don’t forget to revisit, update, and refine the diagram as new research emerges and the project evolves.

When and why to use a customer empathy map

The empathy map is versatile and applicable at various stages of the item development lifecycle. Its strategic deployment can provide clarity, guide decisions, and ensure human-centricity when it matters most. So, when should you use it? Read on to find out!

“Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.” _{Alfred Adler}

During discovery

When squads are trying to understand the problem space and the target market, empathy mapping is invaluable for laying a strong foundation. First, it brings together scattered research, interviews, and observations into one clear view of the person’s experience. Second, it helps teams spot unmet needs, challenges, and opportunities together, making sure the ideas that follow are rooted in real human problems. For teams beginning this process from scratch, structured product research services can accelerate discovery. And just with this little extra help, the insights feeding your empathy map are complete, unbiased, and actionable. 

Before prototyping

Before diving into prototyping and wireframing, using a psychological profile helps validate and refine proposed design directions. By checking design ideas against what the person says, thinks, does, and feels, designers can spot usability issues early. It also helps identify where a concept might not align with the user’s expectations or emotional needs. 

If you are currently on the stage of early testing, check out our article What is a UX prototype in design.

After launch

Even after a service has been launched, a customer empathy map remains a powerful tool for continuous improvement. Post-launch feedback, analytics data, and support tickets can be used to update and refine the visual. There are three positive results here: 

• understanding how customers are actually interacting with the tool 
• identifying what new pain points might have emerged 
• predicting how clients’ emotions or behaviors have evolved

It provides a framework for interpreting live interaction data and identifying future enhancements or new feature development based on real-world usage.

If you feel unsure at any of these stages regarding your current audience portrait and strategies, consider conducting a web design audit. And for guidance on overarching user experience planning, you can explore our insights on UX strategy.

Best practices to maximize the purpose

When you’re learning how to create an empathy map, you should be using the best practices out there. They’ll help you make meaningful, actionable maps that’ll really influence your offering strategy. We’ll go through some of them here.

1. Collaborate across teams

Empathy mapping is most effective when it’s a collaborative effort involving diverse stakeholders. You should bring together designers, managers, developers, marketers, and even sales representatives. Each contributor offers a unique perspective and insights into the purchaser. This practice enriches the visual, fosters shared understanding, and builds consensus around the persona, preventing isolated decision-making.

2. Focus on key user motivations

The next step is to resist the urge to fill the template with every single detail. Instead, concentrate on the most important human motivations, pain points, and goals. This keeps the schematic clear and practical. And you can easily see the key elements that will guide your design and development decisions.

3. Keep insights actionable

The ultimate goal here is to generate insights that lead to tangible improvements. As you progress with your empathy map, constantly ask: “What does this tell us about what the consumer needs?” and “What solutions can we design to address this?” Present your observations so they clearly guide design choices, help prioritize features, or inform strategic planning. 

4. Update regularly

A profile is not a static document. Audience needs and market contexts evolve. That’s why you should regularly revisit and update your chart based on new research, feedback, and item iterations. Think of it as a garden that grows and changes as you learn more about your customer — each update is like watering or pruning to keep it healthy. This ensures your solution strategy remains relevant and responsive to changing human behaviors and emotions.

Customer empathy map vs. journey map

Both the customer empathy map and the journey map are essential in design thinking, as they serve different purposes and offer unique perspectives. Knowing what each does best and how they work together is crucial for a complete human-centered approach.

The former focuses on the individual’s internal world at a specific point in time. It’s about understanding who the person is, and capturing their “says”, “thinks”, “does”, and “feels” in relation to a particular experience or problem. It’s a snapshot, aiming for profound psychological and emotional insights into a subject’s mindset.

Conversely, a customer journey map illustrates the user’s experience over time as they interact with a brand to achieve their goal. It details the steps, touchpoints, channels, emotions, and pain points experienced across various stages, from initial awareness to post-use. It answers how the participant interacts and what their entire path looks like.

“A journey map tells the story of experience, while an empathy map reveals the soul of the traveler.”

In essence, the psychological profile helps you realize who your buyer is and why they behave the way they do. The journey map shows what they do and where they go over time, detailing the sequence of their interaction. Used together, they make the journey more relatable. To further differentiate these tools, check out our article Experience map vs. customer journey map.

Real empathy maps examples in action

Empathy maps can be applied across various industries and product types to gain a detailed picture of specific audience segments. Here are a few practical empathy map examples to show you how any project can benefit from it.

SaaS onboarding

Imagine a new SaaS subscriber attempting to set up an account and integrate a new system. What are their “says”, “thinks”, “does”, and “feels”? Let’s find out!

• Says: “This setup seems complicated,” “Where’s the tutorial video?” or “I need to get this done quickly.”
• Thinks: “Am I doing this right?” “I hope I don’t break anything,” “Will this actually save me time?” or “What if I miss a crucial step?”
• Does: Clicks through help articles, watches short demo videos, frequently consults the pricing page, attempts a quick setup, then pauses.
• Feels: Anxious about making a mistake, frustrated by jargon, hopeful for the promised efficiency, overwhelmed by options.

Insights like these often shape the foundation of effective onboarding flows — an area where specialized SaaS website design services can make a significant difference.

E-commerce

The next example comes from e-commerce. Consider a shopper browsing an online store for a new pair of running shoes. The empathy map will look like this:

• Says: “These look great, but are they comfortable?” “Is this brand reliable?” “I wish they had more colors,” and “Shipping seems expensive.”
• Thinks: “Will these fit my feet properly?” “What if they don’t look good on me?” “I need something for long runs,” and “Is this price really worth it?”
• Does: Reads reviews, compares prices on different sites, zooms in on item images, adds to cart, then navigates to other goods.
• Feels: Excited by the possibilities, hesitant due to uncertainty about fit and comfort, worried about returns, satisfied when finding a good deal.

What conclusions can we draw here? Сustomers need detailed merchandise descriptions, clear sizing guides, buyer-generated content (reviews with photos), and transparent shipping policies to address anxieties and build trust. Addressing these concerns is essential for reducing friction and improving conversions — a core focus of our e-commerce website design services.

Mobile app

If you work in mobile app development, think of a person trying to find a restaurant using a new food delivery mobile app, and check out the empathy map of this client:

• Says: “Too many options, I can’t decide,” “Is this restaurant any good?” “How long will delivery take?”
• Thinks: “I’m hungry, I just want something easy,” “I hope this app is faster than the last one,” “Are there any discounts?” “I hate waiting.”
• Does: Scrolls through categories, filters by cuisine, checks estimated delivery times, reads restaurant ratings, and abandons cart to check another app.
• Feels: Impatient, slightly overwhelmed, hopeful about finding a good meal, frustrated by slow loading times or too many choices.

This insight might lead to design improvements such as streamlined filtering, personalized recommendations, clear delivery time estimates, and visually appealing menus. Reaching such results often requires rethinking navigation, hierarchy, and decision flow — areas where thoughtful mobile application design services can elevate the entire user experience.

Health app

The last practical example comes from the digital health sector. Imagine a person tracking their fitness goals with a new health app. Here is what their empathy map can look like:

• Says: “I need to be more consistent,” “Is my progress good enough?” “This data looks confusing.”
• Thinks: “Am I really making progress?” “I feel a bit overwhelmed by all these numbers,” “I wish I had a personalized plan,” “Is this app actually helping me?”
• Does: Logs their food intake off and on, checks progress charts daily, compares current data to previous weeks, and skips some exercise tracking.
• Feels: Motivated at the start, discouraged by slow progress, confused by complex data displays, hopeful for better health outcomes, and sometimes feels guilty.

Looking at this example, it’s clear that customers want to see their progress in a way that’s easy to understand and actually motivates them. They’re looking for goals that feel personal to them, data that doesn’t require a PhD to interpret, and little nudges along the way to keep them going. Since health data can overwhelm users quickly, designing interfaces that reduce cognitive load and highlight meaningful insights is essential — a priority in our healthcare UX/UI design services.

From empathy map to a successful product — let’s build it together

An empathy map is a fundamental step toward building a solution that truly resonates with its users. It provides a robust foundation of understanding, allowing your staff to move from assumptions to informed, people-centered solutions. Getting to know your customers on a deeper level — their frustrations, habits, worries, and words — helps you spot what you’re really missing. That’s where the magic happens: you can create better solutions, and your whole team gets on the same page about who you’re helping. 

Sure, turning customer feedback into something meaningful isn’t easy, but when you have a full picture of who your customers are, it’s like finally having the cheat codes. If you’re ready to turn these insights into a product roadmap with real impact, our team is here to support the next step. Just reach out through our contact page to get started!