The Four Quadrants, and Why They're Split That Way
An empathy map splits what a team knows about a user into four quadrants: Says, Thinks, Does, Feels. Nielsen Norman Group defines it as a collaborative visualization that externalizes what a team collectively knows about a specific type of user. The quadrant split exists because these four categories rarely agree with each other - and the gap between them is usually where the design insight actually is.
What Goes in Each Quadrant
- Says: direct or paraphrased quotes from interviews, usability sessions, or support tickets. Verbatim, not summarized - summarizing loses the specific language users reach for.
- Thinks: beliefs and concerns the user may not say aloud. Inferred from hesitation, tone, and what they didn't ask about.
- Does: observed behavior - what they clicked, skipped, revisited, or abandoned. Pulled from session recordings and analytics, not self-reported.
- Feels: emotional state during the task - frustration, relief, confusion. Sourced from facial expression, think-aloud commentary, and post-task ratings.
How to Actually Build One
- Pick one persona, one situation. An empathy map for "our users" in general produces quadrants full of platitudes. "A returning customer trying to apply a discount code at checkout" produces quadrants full of decisions.
- Fill it from research, not memory. Pull directly from interview transcripts and recorded sessions. Anything the team can't source to a specific observation gets flagged as an assumption to test, not entered as fact.
- Run it as a workshop. Give each participant sticky notes, ten minutes of silent, independent filling per quadrant, then consolidate as a group. The disagreements that surface during consolidation are usually more useful than the finished map.
- Read for tension, not just content. A user who says "the pricing is clear" but abandons the pricing page every time has just told you where to look next.
Empathy Map vs. Persona
A persona is a finished artifact - a composite profile built to communicate a user type to people who weren't in the research. An empathy map is a working document, built collaboratively, closer to raw synthesis than to a polished deliverable. Build the empathy map first, from real sessions; let it inform the persona, not the other way around.
Where This Fits in Design Thinking
Empathy mapping sits inside the Empathize stage of the Stanford d.school's design thinking process - the point where a team is still trying to understand the problem, before anyone starts defining or solving it. Used well, it stops a team from writing a problem statement that quietly assumes its own solution.
Key Takeaways
- Four quadrants - Says, Thinks, Does, Feels - split verbatim data from inference, and behavior from emotion.
- Source every entry from research. An empathy map built from assumptions just restates what the team already believed.
- Contradictions between quadrants - what a user says versus what they do - are the most actionable part of the exercise.
- Build personas from empathy maps, not empathy maps from personas.
