An empathy map is a tool for visualizing the user experience, including users’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The knowledge gained from empathy maps can encourage project collaboration throughout the product development life cycle.

What is an empathy map template?

An empathy map template is a pre-designed framework that guides teams in organizing user insights quickly and efficiently. Using a template helps you save the time you would have spent creating an empathy map from scratch. Whenever you need to gain insights into consumer behavior, thoughts, and feelings in the future, you’ll have a ready-to-go template to work from.

Why are empathy maps important?

Empathy mapping is essential for making user-centric decisions. This process helps you understand how your direct consumers feel about your product or service. It also helps keep team members on the same page by aligning them around shared insights.

Tips for creating an empathy map

Accuracy and comprehensiveness are crucial when creating an empathy map, so ensure you use actual user data. You can collect data through customer surveys and interviews, user behavior, and other measurable metrics. However, finding accurate user data that describes how users think and feel can be challenging.

A comprehensive empathy map should also include diverse perspectives. Analyzing various user perspectives helps you create a more complete empathy map that accounts for small details.

Empathy map example

Let’s look at an empathy map example to give you a better idea of how to create and use one. In this example, we’ll create a fake empathy map for our app users.

• Think & Feel: The ads are distracting. Does this actually help me save time?

• See: Many successful professionals use this app. Some people use similar apps from competitors.

• Hear: This app has been recommended by colleagues and industry experts.

• Say: “This app is easy to use.” “I liked that my settings were saved between sessions.”

• Do: Restarted the app when it ran slow—changed to dark mode setting.

• Pain Points: Feeling overwhelmed by the number of tabs and settings. Fear of making the wrong decision.

Gains: Saving time on simple tasks. Learning more about my industry.