Adam, I will make a follow up post going over these techniques and why we use them over traditional personas.

A user scenario should just be a written document. It should include work role and user class info as well. You can stylize it if you want and make it really glossy or just keep it as a Google Doc. It depends on if this is for a client or for an internal team to use.

A user scenario should be a written scenario of what a user is trying to do. This should be 100 percent based on the interview and not involve conjecture. You can synthesize like users together. Then, when you are designing, you can make sure you are hitting all of the pain points.

Here is a good write up about user scenarios: https://articles.uie.com/when-it-comes-to-personas-the-real-value-is-in-the-scenarios/

This isn’t the exact empathy map template we use, but it’s not that far off: https://www.clickz.com/getting-to-grips-with-mobile-design-methods-and-lingo-empathy-maps-and-storybo/98439/

For the empathy maps, I just print out a blank template and fill it out with pen (or have the areas in a Google Doc and fill them out there). The user scenario is harder to do live during an interview, but the empathy map is best done during the interview and then completed in an immediate post-mortem with interview team.

We usually have three people from my team in each user interview session.