Empathy Map Builder

An empathy map organises what you know or believe about one specific user into six buckets: what they say, think, do and feel, plus their pains and gains. It's a synthesis tool: you use it to make sense of interview notes, support tickets or observation, not to invent a user from nothing.

A persona is a finished, presentable summary of a user type, usually built to be shared and referred back to. An empathy map is the working document that comes before it: messier, quadrant-based, meant for a team to fill in together while synthesising research, not to be the polished output itself.

Base it on real input if you have any: interview transcripts, support tickets, session recordings, sales call notes. Give everyone sticky notes (or use this tool live on a shared screen), work quadrant by quadrant, and put each observation in its own note so it can be moved, grouped, or challenged individually. Says and Does should come from things you actually observed; Thinks and Feels are inferences, and it's worth marking which is which as you go. Keep one note per idea, and if Pains and Gains don't surface once the first four quadrants are full, the research input was probably too thin.

No, treat it as a hypothesis. An empathy map filled in by a team, without real user input behind it, records what the team believes or assumes about a user, which can be a useful and clarifying exercise but isn't research. Validate the Pains and Gains it produces against real users before you commit design or engineering time to acting on them.