While you can create an empathy map on your own, it's better to do it with a team to get multiple perspectives.

Here's a 5-step process to get you started on an empathy map:

1. Define your scope and goals. Decide who your user is and what task they're accomplishing.
2. Gather materials you're going to use to make the actual empathy map. You can do this with a whiteboard, post-its, and sharpies, or remotely on a tool like Mural or RealTime.
3. Collect data. You can obtain the necessary information through interviews, direct observation, contextual inquiries, and even diary studies. Bring the findings to your team and start empathy mapping as a group.
4. Have everyone on your team read through the data and generate different ideas for every quadrant.
5. Converge all different post-its. Start to cluster similar ideas together and name the themes.

Depending on the purpose of your empathy map, polish and digitize the output accordingly. Include the user, any outstanding questions, and the date and version number.^[1]