Four rings from what they see to what they feel. Who they are, what they need to do, their pains and gains — then four concentric rings of experience: social (what they see), physical (what they do), personal (what they think and say) and emotional (how they feel).
The empathy canvas is a structured way to stand in one person's situation before you decide what to build for them. The left side establishes the facts — who they are, what they must get done, what they fear and what they want. The rings on the right move from the outside in: what the person sees around them, what they actually do, what they think and say, and finally what they feel. Working from the outside in matters. Teams that start with feelings guess; teams that start with observable behaviour earn the right to infer a feeling.
Built for: Product, UX and service teams before they design anything — and founders who have never met their customer.
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?
What are they observing in their environment?
What are they doing today about their situation?
What are some of the thoughts they are having?
How do they feel about the situation they are in?
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.
Take the pains, gains and the ‘what they need to do’ list into the User Story Evaluation Matrix, and the whole canvas into the AI Agent Design Canvas if the thing you are building talks back.
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.
Score every competitor against the stories your user actually has.
The clever “how” between a business goal and a design team.
Design the person first. Then the agent that serves them.