Empathy Map

Empathy maps are a tool used by UX researchers, designers, and product teams to gain deeper insight into their users. This method helps the team understand the user’s needs, wants, pain points, and emotional state. In an empathy map, you typically categorize data into sections like "Think and Feel," "Hear," "See," "Say and Do," and "Pains and Gains."

After collecting feedback through methods such as interviews, surveys, field studies, or usability tests, we can use CustomerIQ and this template to instantly categorize our insights into our empathy map sections.

This template creates an empathy map based on the following tags:

Think and Feel: Tag insights related to the user's emotions, beliefs, concerns, aspirations, etc. Possible insights include: "Worrying about deadlines," "Aspiring for a promotion," "Believes if they could do this faster, it would be better."

Hear: Tag insights related to what the user hears from their environment, including direct quotes from colleagues, friends, family, or influencers. Possible insights include: "Peer Influence," "Media Influence."

See: Tags insights related to what the user sees in their environment. This could be things like user interfaces, competitor products, etc. Possible insights include: "UI Interactions," "Competitor Products."

Say and Do: Tags insights related to what the user says or does when interacting with the product or in their environment. Possible insights include: "User Actions," "Verbal Feedback."

Pains: Tags insights related to user frustrations, fears, obstacles, etc. Possible insights include: "Usability Issues," "Confusion," "Frustration."

Gains: Tags insights related to what the user wants to achieve, their needs, or measures of success. Possible insights include: "Desired Features," "Goals," "Success Metrics."

How to use this template to create your empathy map

This template creates the above tags for you to organize your insights. Most templates use our classification view, which can tag all insights for you automatically after you provide one or more examples of an insight that fits into a given tag category. Here’s how to use this template:

1. Create a new view and choose the Empathy Map template
2. Find at least one example from the uncategorized section and map it to one of the columns created by this template
3. When each column has one or more examples in it, click “Classify”

And that’s it! CustomerIQ’s AI will go to work sorting your insights. This process typically takes only 20-30 seconds.

Pro tip: Classify, then discover

If you find that the newly formed groups have a large number of insights, you can find themes within this new group by creating a new view, filtering by this classification tag, and using the AI to discover underlying themes. Learn more about the practice: Classify, then discover here.