You may understand the problem your customer has and what motivates them to act.

But understanding a customer requires more than knowing why they would act or not act to solve a problem.

The Customer Empathy Map helps you move from: I know what my customer needs to I understand how my customer experiences the problem.

Instead of looking at the problem from your perspective, you’ll learn to see it through the customer’s eyes.

What is this toolkit about?

The Customer Empathy Map is a guided tool for understanding your customer’s experience, perspective, emotions, and behaviour.

It helps you explore what your customer may be:

• Thinking

• Feeling

• Seeing

• Hearing

• Saying

• Doing

• Struggling with

• Trying to achieve

Your goal isn’t to guess what your customer wants.

Your goal is to develop a customer-centred view of the problem that you can later test with real people.

What problem does it solve?

Experts often design solutions from their own perspective.

They think:

“If I were this customer, this is what I would want.”

But you are not your customer.

Your customer may see the problem differently, describe it differently, experience different frustrations, or care about a completely different outcome.

The Customer Empathy Map helps you avoid:

• Designing for yourself instead of the customer

• Assuming you already know what customers think

• Focusing only on the obvious problem

• Missing emotional and practical barriers

• Creating solutions that make sense to you but not to the customer

• Using your professional language instead of the customer’s language

The closer you get to the customer’s reality, the better you can understand the problem you’re trying to solve.

When should I use it?

Use this toolkit when:

• You’ve identified a problem worth investigating.

• You want to understand the customer’s experience more deeply.

• You need to explore what customers think, feel, say, and do.

• You’re developing a solution for a specific customer group.

• You want to prepare for customer interviews or discovery conversations.

• You notice that you’re making assumptions about what customers want or need.

Use it as a hypothesis-building tool, not as proof of what customers actually think.

Your assumptions should eventually be tested through conversations with real customers.

What will I have when I’m done?

You’ll have a Customer Empathy Map that captures:

• What your customer is thinking

• What they are feeling

• What they see around them

• What they hear from others

• What they say and do

• Their frustrations and challenges

• Their desired outcomes

• Important assumptions that still need to be tested

You’ll finish with a more complete picture of the person experiencing the problem, not just the problem itself.

How to use this toolkit

This Notion toolkit will guide you through the key dimensions of your customer’s experience:

1. Define the customer
Choose one specific customer group and situation for each of the 3 problens you got after using The Problem Opportunity Finder. Avoid trying to map everyone at once. Map each separately.

2. Map their experience
Explore what they may be thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing, saying, and doing.

3. Identify their pain and desired outcomes
Capture what frustrates them and what they are trying to achieve.

4. Separate assumptions from evidence
Mark what you know from actual customer interactions versus what you are currently assuming.

5. Identify what you need to learn
Turn your biggest assumptions into questions you can investigate with real people.

Don’t confuse empathy with imagination. The map gives you hypotheses; customer conversations give you evidence. At this stage, you don’t have ecidence yet.

The Toolkit

Customer Empathy Map Notion Template

Use the interactive Notion template to map each of the 3 groups experiences.

👉 Open the Customer Empathy Map Toolkit

Duplicate the template into your Notion workspace before you begin.