Empathy Map Generator

What an empathy map is for

An empathy map is a workshop artefact, not a research output. Its job is to compress what your team thinks they know about a user — across four lenses — onto a single sheet, so you can argue about the gaps. The four canonical quadrants come from NN/g's empathy mapping framework:

• Says — quotes the user might verbalise out loud, in interviews or to friends.
• Thinks — internal monologue. Often things they wouldn't say, especially if they feel embarrassed about them.
• Does — observable behaviour. The thing a video would capture.
• Feels — emotional state during the experience.

This generator extends the four with three additions we've found make empathy maps more useful in practice: anxieties (specific worries holding them back), accessibility considerations (so inclusion gets surfaced upstream), and trust signals (what would actually convince them to commit).

Empathy map vs persona — when to use which

Personas describe who the user is across many sessions. Empathy maps describe what's happening for them in the moment. They're complementary:

• Persona first when you need to anchor a project around a single audience and write copy, prioritise features, or scope.
• Empathy map first when you have a specific moment in the experience you want to design for — onboarding, error recovery, a checkout step, a critical decision point.
• Both when you're running discovery, especially with stakeholders. The persona keeps the project anchored. The empathy map keeps the moment human.

How to use the output

1. Read it suspiciously. Anywhere you find yourself nodding along, ask: do I actually know this, or did I just like the way it was phrased? AI output sounds confident; it doesn't replace research.
2. Mark gaps in red. Anywhere a quadrant is thin or wrong, highlight it. That's your research backlog.
3. Pull the strongest item from each quadrant into the design brief. One says, one thinks, one does, one feels. Concrete enough that anyone could test the design against them.
4. Run it again for adjacent moments. The same persona behaves differently when onboarding versus when failing a payment. Generate two or three maps and compare.

Why "trust signals" matters

Most empathy maps stop at feels. But the work of design is often to convert feels nervous into willing to commit — and that conversion is mediated by trust signals: testimonials, regulator badges, pricing transparency, refund language, the right photo of a real person.

By making trust signals explicit in the empathy map, the team gets pushed to ask the right downstream design question: what specifically would this user need to see, here, to feel safe enough to act? That's a much sharper brief than "make them feel reassured".

What's next

Once you've mapped the user, two natural next steps:

• Generate the corresponding persona if you don't have one yet — same Gemini-grounded approach.
• Run the contrast checker on the surfaces that user will actually touch. Empathy is wasted if the page they reach has illegible text.