Design the person first. Then the agent that serves them. The empathy canvas on the left, your agent on the right. Who the customer is, what they need, their pains and wants, their four rings of experience — then the agent's personality and tone, core tasks, specialisms, and the actions and APIs it needs.
Most AI agents are specified from the model outwards: pick a model, write a system prompt, bolt on tools, then discover in testing that nobody wanted to talk to it. This canvas reverses the order. The left half is the empathy canvas — a real person, their tasks, their pains and wants, and the four rings of what they see, do, think and feel. Only when that is on the board do you move right and design the agent: the personality and tone that person would trust, the core tasks in priority order, the specialisms it must have (and the things it must refuse), and finally the actions, APIs and fallbacks that make it real. The arrow between the halves is the point of the canvas: everything on the right must be traceable to something on the left.
Built for: Teams specifying a customer-facing AI agent, assistant or copilot — before the first prompt is written.
Work the boxes in the numbered order. The order is the method.
Who are we empathising with?
What do they need to do?
What are their fears, challenges and frustrations?
What are their desires, wants and needs?
See, do, think and say, feel — worked from the outside in.
What kind of personality would resonate most with this person — friendly, professional, humorous, calm?
What are the essential tasks the agent must perform to meet the person's key objectives?
What specific knowledge or expertise must the agent have to serve this person effectively?
What actions must the agent perform to meet user needs — retrieving data, initiating processes, making recommendations?
The free edition is the whole canvas — nothing held back except the watermark. The pack is for people who will run it more than once and want it clean, in Miro, with the full guide.
The full canvas at A3 with every prompt, and a two-page quick guide. Watermarked with the DSH mark, otherwise complete.
Print at A3 landscape. Or open the PDF in Miro / FigJam as a board background.
All five canvases, clean and print-ready, with the full walkthrough guides. Buy once, use it in every workshop you ever run.
Secure checkout by Lemon Squeezy. Instant download. VAT handled at checkout. Single-team licence — run it on your company and your clients, don't resell it.
The full guide in the pack adds what good looks like for each box, a worked example, the agenda and the mistakes.
The completed right-hand side maps directly onto a system prompt (personality, specialisms, refusals), a task backlog (core tasks) and an integration plan (actions and APIs). If the agent will be judged on decisions rather than answers, read the LEVER method for how to measure whether it made them better.
Yes — both editions. Run it in your workshops, your company and your client work. The one thing you can't do is resell the files or upload them to template marketplaces.
A light tiled DSH mark and the site address across the sheet. Prompts, boxes and layout are identical to the pack version. The preview above is the free edition.
The pack includes a 4K PNG of each canvas. Drop it on a board, lock it, and put sticky notes on top.
Pack buyers get every new version of every canvas by email. The free edition is always the current version on this page.
Stop competing in someone else's category. Name your own.
Four rings from what they see to what they feel.
Score every competitor against the stories your user actually has.
The clever “how” between a business goal and a design team.