Mapping User Empathy

What is an Empathy Map?

At its core, an empathy map is a collaborative tool used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It helps teams get inside a user's head to make better, more user-centered decisions. The first step is understanding what we mean by empathy in a design context.

Let's start with a short video from the Google UX Design Certificate that defines empathy and introduces the empathy map as a tool to build it.

As you saw, the map is typically divided into four quadrants that capture a user's experience.

The four core quadrants are:

• Says: What the user says out loud. These are direct quotes gathered from interviews or usability tests.
• Thinks: What the user is thinking throughout the experience. These are thoughts that may not be spoken aloud and are often inferred from their behavior and expressions.
• Does: The actions and behaviors the user takes. This is what we can physically observe them doing.
• Feels: The user's emotional state. This captures their feelings, such as frustrated, anxious, confused, or excited.

This structure forces us to consider the user from multiple angles and, importantly, to notice any contradictions—for example, when what a user says doesn't match what they do. These contradictions are often where the most powerful design opportunities lie.

How to Create an Empathy Map

Creating an empathy map is a process of synthesizing your research data into this four-quadrant framework. Given your analytical background, you'll appreciate that it's a structured method for processing qualitative data.

Let's review a step-by-step guide to this process.

Your Turn: Create an Empathy Map in Figma

Now it's time to put this into practice. In the previous lesson, you worked with interview summaries for Priya, Aisha, and Rahul to create a user persona. We will now use that same data to create an empathy map.

This is a perfect example of how personas and empathy maps work together. The persona represents "The Discerning Event Planner." The empathy map will help us understand what this planner experiences during the specific scenario of searching for and buying decor online.

First, let's watch a short video on how to facilitate an empathy mapping session remotely using Figma. This is a highly practical skill for a freelance designer.

Your Task

1. Open a new file in Figma. Create a large frame for your empathy map.
2. Following the video's guidance, draw a 2x2 grid and label the four quadrants: Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels. Put the name of our user, let's use Priya, in the center.
3. Review the interview summaries from the previous lesson (re-pasted below for convenience).
4. For each summary, extract specific data points and add them as "sticky notes" (a simple rectangle with text) to the appropriate quadrant of your map.
   • Says: Use direct quotes.
   • Does: What actions are they taking? (e.g., "Spends hours on Pinterest," "Compares items").
   • Thinks: What are their internal thoughts or beliefs? (e.g., "Sizing is a guessing game," "This is overwhelming"). You will need to infer these.
   • Feels: What emotions are they experiencing? (e.g., "Overwhelmed," "Stressed," "Worried," "Frustrated").

Spend about 15-20 minutes on this task. Don't worry about making it perfect; the goal is to practice the act of sorting research data into this framework.

Interview Summaries (from previous lesson):

• User 1: Priya (Baby Shower Planner)

  • Goal: Plan a beautiful, cohesive baby shower for her sister.
  • Context: Spends hours on Pinterest and Etsy but feels overwhelmed.
  • Pain Points: Worries about product quality ("feels like a gamble"). Stressed about coordinating shipping times from different sellers. Hates doing "detective work" to verify if an item is good.
  • Quote: "I don't have time for that kind of detective work for every single piece of decor."

• User 2: Aisha (Busy Parent)

  • Goal: Throw a unique, memorable 1st birthday party for her son.
  • Context: A corporate lawyer with very little free time. She's not price-sensitive and is willing to pay for convenience and quality.
  • Pain Points: Finds it frustrating to buy items from 10 different shops to create one look. Wants something that feels special, not a generic "party-in-a-box." Overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices.
  • Quote: "Just tell me what to buy. I'd happily pay more for a curated set that I know will look amazing and save me 20 hours of searching."

• User 3: Rahul (Anniversary Planner)

  • Goal: Organize an elegant 25th-anniversary dinner for his parents.
  • Context: Doesn't use Pinterest and finds visual search sites confusing. He's looking for sophistication, not "cutesy" themes.
  • Pain Points: Finds it hard to search for "classy" or "elegant" decor. He's worried about buying something that looks tacky or cheap in person.
  • Quote: "My biggest fear is spending hundreds of dollars on things that arrive and look like they belong at a children's party."

Synthesizing the Map: Pains and Gains

Once populated, the empathy map isn't just a collection of notes; it's a tool for synthesis. Look at your completed map. What are the dominant themes? The "Feels" quadrant is likely full of negative emotions, and the "Thinks" quadrant is full of worries.

This leads us to two bonus sections often added to modern empathy maps: Pains and Gains.

• Pains: What are the user's biggest frustrations, fears, and obstacles? These often come directly from the "Thinks" and "Feels" quadrants.
  • Example from our data: Fear of poor quality, wasted time, feeling overwhelmed.
• Gains: What does the user truly want to achieve? What does success look like? This is their ultimate goal or aspiration.
  • Example from our data: Feeling confident in their purchase, creating a beautiful and unique event, saving time.

Your background in business and finance makes this step particularly intuitive. Identifying "Pains" is like identifying risks or liabilities. Identifying "Gains" is like defining the desired return on investment for the user. A successful product solves the pains to help the user achieve the gains.

Conclusion

Well done. You have now taken raw research and visualized it through two critical UX lenses: the persona (who the user is) and the empathy map (what the user experiences). You've practiced the essential skill of sorting qualitative data into a structured format and seen how to build this artifact directly in Figma.

Key Takeaways:

• An empathy map provides a snapshot of a user's experience within a specific context, focusing on what they Say, Think, Do, and Feel.
• It's a powerful tool for building empathy and aligning a team around a shared understanding of the user.
• Contradictions between the quadrants (e.g., Saying vs. Doing) often reveal deep user insights.
• Synthesizing the map into Pains and Gains directly connects user needs to business opportunities, which is crucial for making a case to clients.

Preview of the Next Lesson:
We now have a strong understanding of our user's identity and their inner world. In the next lesson, we will zoom out again to map their entire process from start to finish. We'll create a User Journey Map, which visualizes the user's actions, thoughts, and feelings across every touchpoint of their experience. This will allow us to pinpoint exactly where their biggest frustrations occur and where we can have the most design impact.