A collaborative visualization tool used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to create a shared understanding of user needs, and aid in decision making.
Empathy Maps
Empathy Maps are a collaborative design-thinking tool for capturing what a team knows about a particular kind of user in a single, shared picture. Popularized by Dave Gray at XPLANE, the map divides a user’s experience into quadrants — commonly what they say, think, do, and feel — so a group can externalize scattered assumptions and turn them into a shared understanding before decisions get made.
- A quadrant canvas - Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels (often with Pains and Gains) give the conversation a fixed, low-friction structure.
- A single persona per map - Each map focuses on one user type, keeping the picture concrete rather than averaging everyone into no one.
- A collaborative, workshop-native artifact - Built together on a whiteboard or shared canvas, it surfaces disagreement and gaps in knowledge early.
- A bridge to research - Filled in from interviews and observation, it exposes exactly where the team is guessing versus where it has evidence.
In API work, empathy maps show up when teams design for the actual developer or consumer on the other end of a contract rather than an idealized one. Mapping what an integrating developer says, does, and feels while onboarding sharpens documentation, error messaging, and the first-call experience. As agents become first-class API consumers, the same discipline extends to mapping the machine’s “experience” — what it needs to discover, understand, and successfully call an API without a human in the loop.
