A free guide to empathy maps for sorting what customers actually tell you
Nielsen Norman Group, a long-running user experience research firm, published a free guide to empathy maps: a four-box chart labeled Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels that organizes what you know about a customer. The authors recommend support tickets and call logs as inputs because they capture unprompted complaints. A shop owner or freelancer could map a handful of real emails or reviews to see where people get confused. The guide also warns against letting AI generate customer insights you never gathered, and asks you to label untraceable notes as assumptions.
- For
- Detroit small business owners and freelance creatives who handle customer emails, client calls, or reviews and want a simple way to separate real customer evidence from guesses, with no UX background required.
- Cost
- The article and the Empathy Mapping Poster (PDF) are listed as free downloads. NN/g also promotes a self-paced paid course, Empathy Maps for Impact; its price is not stated on the article page, and the course is optional.
- Access
- Open online article with no stated sign-up requirement; the poster PDF is linked from the page as a free download. The guide is written for UX teams but the method works for one person mapping alone, which the authors say is fine in any shareable format.
Your moveRead the guide, download the free poster PDF, then build one map from five or so real customer emails or reviews and mark any note you cannot trace to a source as an assumption.
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