A six-section synthesis canvas created by Dave Gray at XPLANE for converting raw user research into a shared team understanding of a specific user's experience.
What is this person's real experience, and where does what they say diverge from what they actually do and feel?
The Empathy Map is a structured synthesis canvas for converting raw user research into a shared team understanding of one person. It organises observationsObservationUser ResearchA specific behaviour or statement observedView reference → across what a user says, thinks, does, and feels, so the team moves from a pile of interview notes to a coherent picture of a real human being and their situation.
Dave Gray created the Empathy Map at XPLANE, the visual thinking consultancy he founded, around 2008. It was designed as a facilitation tool for design-thinking workshops: a canvas that a team could fill together, live, using observations from field research. The map appeared in the 2010 book Gamestorming, which Gray co-authored with Sunni Brown and James Macanufo, and that publication brought it into widespread use in product and UX practice. In 2017, Gray published a significant revision. The updated map centres the user's goal at the top, adds explicit Pains and Gains sections borrowed from the Value PropositionValue PropositionBusiness ModelA unique value offered to customersView reference → Canvas, and numbers the sections to make the sequence of the exercise explicit. The revision also places Think and Feel at the centre of the diagram, inside the figure's head, to distinguish internal experience from observable behaviour. Today the 2017 version is the form most teams encounter, and it is available for download at gamestorming.com and xplane.com.
The map has six sections. Work through them with the research materials (interview transcripts, observation notes, survey responsesSurvey ResponseUser ResearchA response to a survey instrumentView reference →) in front of the team, and populate each section from evidenceEvidenceValidationData supporting or refuting a hypothesisView reference →, not supposition.
Says: verbatim quotes from the user. What did they actually say, in their own words, during interviews or observations?
Thinks: what the user is privately processing but may not voice. What beliefs and concerns show up between the lines of what they say?
Does: observable actions. What does the user actually do, step by step, when they engage with this problem?
Feels: the emotional undercurrent. What is the user's mood or emotional state at key moments?
Pains: the frustrations, fears, and obstacles the user encounters.
Gains: the outcomesOutcomeStrategyA desired business or user outcomeView reference → and aspirations the user is working towards.
The most generative moment in the exercise is the comparison between Says and Does. A user who says they want a particular featureFeatureProduct SpecificationA product capability or featureView reference → but never actually uses it when it exists is telling you something important. The gap between stated preference and observed behaviour is where product insightsInsightUser ResearchA synthesised finding from researchView reference → tend to live.
A worked example. A team is researching how operations managers handle weekly reporting. Interviews produce: Says ("I spend two hours every Monday just pulling numbers together"), Does (observed exporting data from three separate tools into a spreadsheet), Thinks ("I'm sure there's a better way but I don't have time to find it"), Feels (mild anxiety every Sunday evening about Monday's report). Pains: manual reconciliation, riskRiskComplianceA risk to the product or businessView reference → of error. Gains: confident, fast, accurate reporting without manual work. The map makes the insight concrete: the pain comes from the fragmentation of data sourcesData SourceData & AnalyticsA data source or integrationView reference →, and a consolidation feature would address it directly.
Use the Empathy Map after qualitative research sessions, when the team has interview transcripts and observation notes but no shared model of the person they are designing for. It is a synthesis tool, not a data-collection tool, so it requires prior research to fill honestly. It works best when run collaboratively with the people who conducted the research, because the richest observations are often in the researcher's memory, not yet written down in the transcript.
The map earns less when the team fills it from assumptionAssumptionStrategyA belief taken as true that underpins a strategyView reference →. A map populated without reference to real research is a personaPersonaUserAn archetype representing a user segmentView reference → by another name, and it will inherit a persona's main weakness: team consensus mistaken for user truth. One map per primary persona is the right scope; a single map that tries to represent all users at once dilutes the specificity that makes the tool useful.
The Empathy Map is a matrix framework in the research category. Its sections map onto distinct entity types in the Unified Product Graph, making the map a structured view over research evidence, with every cell backed by typed, linkable nodes.
quoteinsightjobneedPains and Gains from the 2017 revision extend naturally to needquoteinsightneed