When to use it
Use before defining a problem or generating solutions. Especially when designing for someone whose experience differs from yours, or when previous solutions failed despite seeming logical.
It's particularly effective when you're in The Untangle — you need to understand another person's world before you can name the real problem.
How it works in The Studio
Here's how a session works with WAiDE:
Sample output
Here's what an Empathy Map looks like in practice:
- "We've tried this before and it didn't work"
- "The team doesn't have bandwidth"
- "If this fails, it'll reflect badly on me"
- "I don't fully understand the new approach"
- Delays meetings
- Delegates to junior staff
- Asks for more data
- Anxious about losing control
- Protective of team
- Quietly curious
What you get
Vivid, concrete picture of one specific user — their world, tensions, and the gap between stated behaviour and inner experience. Typically surfaces one key insight that reframes the design challenge.
Foundation
Developed by Dave Gray at XPLANE as part of the Gamestorming toolkit (2010). Core component of the Stanford d.school Design Thinking curriculum. Used by Google, IBM, SAP, and IDEO.
Why it works
Empathy Maps work because most product decisions are made by people who are not their customers. The people building a tool are, almost by definition, different from the people using it — different technical comfort levels, different contexts, different motivations, different anxieties. Without a deliberate process to close that gap, teams build for themselves and wonder why adoption is slow.
The four quadrants — think, feel, say, do — capture different layers of experience that surveys and interviews routinely miss. What people say is often different from what they do. What they think is often different from what they feel. A good Empathy Map surfaces these tensions, and those tensions are usually where the most valuable product insights live.
The tool was originally developed by Dave Gray at XPLANE and is now widely used in design thinking practice. Its value scales well — a 20-minute solo exercise still produces useful insight; a two-hour workshop with actual customer interviews produces transformative ones.
The most important quadrant: "Pains and Gains" at the bottom. Everything above it feeds into these two boxes. If you can only do one part of the map, do this — it maps directly onto what's worth building and what's worth promising.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between an Empathy Map and a customer persona?
A persona describes who someone is — demographics, job title, background, goals. An Empathy Map describes what they experience — what they think, feel, see, hear, say, and do right now. You need both, but for design decisions the Empathy Map is usually more useful because it drives toward emotional and behavioural insight, not demographic description.
Do I need to run real user interviews before doing this?
You get more accurate maps from real interviews, but you can start with informed assumptions and then validate. WAiDE will work with whatever you bring. The discipline of filling out the map almost always reveals where your assumptions are weakest — those gaps become your interview priorities.
How many users should I map?
One specific user per map. Not a composite, not a segment — one real or clearly imagined person. This specificity is the constraint that makes the map useful. If you need to represent multiple users, create multiple maps and compare them. The differences between maps are often the most interesting output.
What happens after the Empathy Map is done?
Use it to sharpen your value proposition. The 'pains' block maps directly to problems worth solving. The 'gains' block maps to outcomes worth promising. The map pairs naturally with the Value Proposition Canvas, which takes these insights and tests them against what you're actually offering.