The Journey Through it All
- Stephanie Cabral
- Mar 13, 2022
- 3 min read
As a user experience designer, there is a lot of focus on creating a solution for a product or service that users will understand and benefit from. However, it is so much more than that.
If you’ve been following my blog posts for the past few weeks, you’ll know that I’ve been studying principles of user experience design. The heart and soul of this field is the design thinking process. Each step (especially the first in my opinion) unearths crucial information that you need in order to be successful. Here’s a quick recap:
Empathize – have conversations with your users to learn how they think and what issues they are having
Define – clearly state what the problem is that you are trying to solve
Ideate – start brainstorming solutions to the problem through research, drawings, etc.
Prototype – choose one of the solutions from the previous step and create a prototype (or several)
Test – show your solution to users for feedback and use it to improve the design
There are dozens of methods to gather information at each step such as empathy mapping, persona creation, feel/need statements, point of view statements, etc. The more you know about your user, the better off you will be.
As I started saying earlier, it’s a common assumption that the focus of user experience design is creating the best solution. Granted, that is the end goal, but the exercises needed to get there is where the bulk of the thinking lies.
A journey map is a visual representation of the process in which a user interacts with a product, service, or experience, from start to finish. You can have journey maps for planning a wedding, making dinner, applying to grad school…basically anything. Every journey map has the following:
Scenario: What is it that your user is doing/experiencing?
Persona: Who is completing this journey? This is where you tap into your user personas. What’s their name? Their occupation? Their values, beliefs, and motivations?
Phases/Timeline: What is the period of time that this journey takes place? You can either define it numerically, such as 1 week or through stages like research, exploration, purchase.
Actions and Channels: What actions are being taken under each phase of the journey? In addition, through what medium is that action being done? For example, if the first phase is research, your user could be searching Google, exploring Reddit forums, and consulting with friends. This would take place on a computer (online) and phone.
Thoughts: What is your user thinking about or expecting in that stage? This could be related to the process, the product, or personal feelings.
Emotions: Which emotions do the actions and thoughts within a phase entice? Your user could be annoyed or excited to be doing research for the product.
Opportunities for Improvement: These are areas within the process that you think need to be improved. If an action is causing some grief or annoyance to the user, then something could be done to address that.
Legend: To save space, icons and symbols are used to convey certain pieces of information, like emotions or channels. It’s important to put somewhere what those symbols mean so the person reading the journey map doesn’t become confused or make their own assumptions.
To test out my journey mapping skills, I created one for purchasing a new iPhone, which is an experience I recently went through myself. I utilized a user persona similar to the one I created a few posts ago (one that mostly resembles me). Instead of time, I had 5 phases because the time length could vary: research, preparation, exploration, decision, and purchase.
I focused on the main emotions I felt throughout the process, and what channels I used to perform the actions in each phase. My stab at a journey map can be seen below.
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