Numbers heavy, percentages on preferences, opinions from the current experience of a user. Data. It’s one of the best ways a designer can leverage a particular design solution, but does it tell the whole story?
Are our users numbers? Are they percentages with no names, no faces, and no feelings. Yes a data set can tell a product team what a user thinks right now, in the current survey or interview, at that current time. But there is so much more to our users!
Our users have lives, similar to ours, with jobs, families, struggles, and successes. They go eat pizza on Friday nights, kayak on the weekend, and catch their favorite shows on Tuesday nights. They may have low patience, pretend they aren’t home when door-to-door salesmen knock, and have yet to master that family lasagna recipe.
Our users are people too. More than that affinity diagram above, and definitely more than a percentage. However, are our teams taking into account the whole story, or are they quickly browsing over data sets to come to quick conclusions and moving on with the product creation process.
It’s easy to get lost in the numbers. It’s easy to forget that “users” are people too with lives very similar to yours.
As designers we need to gather the necessary data but also use UX strategies such as User Journey Maps to paint the whole picture of the people who will be using our products.
The usefulness of a user journey map is that we can mainly assume and demonstrate the current and possible way in which the user can interact with the product. We can better understand what our user is doing way before they even open your app/product, what are they trying to accomplish by doing so, and how this action plays a larger role into the daily life of a user. User journeys allow us to peer into the emotional and psychological aspects of the user, to see their point of view, and ultimately build the level of empathy needed to take your product/service from just good to dam near great.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/all-about-customer-journey-mapping/
Nielsen Norman Group provides these key steps below to crafting user journey maps:
Establish the “why and the “what”. First, identify the business goal that the journey map will support. Make sure there are clear answers to these basic key questions before you begin the process:
What business goal does this journey map support?
Who will use it?
Who is it about and what experience does it address?
How will it be shared?
Point of view:
First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? For example, a university might choose either students or faculty members, both of which would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually aligns with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative.
Scenario:
Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events, such as purchasing behavior or taking a trip.
Actions, mindsets, and emotions:
At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies . The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Is the purpose to evaluate or design an entire, broad purchasing cycle or a contained system?
Touchpoints and channels:
The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the company) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or physical store) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered.
Take time to craft user journey maps to paint the whole picture of the people who will be using your product. Generating a high level of empathy has many benefits such as gaining a loyal customer base and potentially higher sales. But most importantly, and between that lasagna recipe and Discovery Channel show, you will understand how your product is actually solving a problem in your user’s life.