Empathy maps help teams understand and focus on user needs. In user-centered design, empathy maps are best used from the very beginning of the design process.

Both the processes of making an empathy map and the finished artifact have important benefits:

• They help capture who a user or persona is. Empathy maps help you analyze qualitative research and discover gaps in your current knowledge.
• They communicate a user or persona to the team and stakeholders. An empathy map illustrates user attitudes and behaviors, which can help protect the project from bias.
• They collect data directly from the user. When filled in directly by users, empathy maps can act as a secondary data source and represent a starting point for a summary of the user session.^[1]