This month, I am working with a collaborator on the topic of user experience journey mapping. Julie Webb is a design thinking consultant, facilitator, and coach. She focuses her work in education, leading innovation, organizational development, and systems of professional growth. You'll hear more from us in the coming weeks and see a full article by the end of the month.
Building Maps
There is no perfect prescriptive approach to building user experience maps. We have suggested the above key elements, but an effective map may exclude one or two of these, or it may take on a novel or unexpected form. We would like to suggest however, that anyone can use the tool and, especially for the beginner, following the approach outlined below should lead to success.
Open Up the Empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, sometimes defined as the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another person. It is a key mindset in design thinking and a critical component of understanding and depicting the user experience. We’ll share two insights from the design firm IDEO on the role of empathy in human-centered design. First,
“human-centered design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you’re designing for are your roadmap to innovative solutions. All you have to do is empathize, understand them, and bring them along with you in the design process.”
And further:
“Embracing human-centered design means believing that all problems, even the seemingly intractable ones like poverty, gender equality, and clean water, are solvable. Moreover, it means believing that the people who face those problems every day are the ones who hold the key to their answer. Human-centered design offers problem solvers of any stripe a chance to design with communities, to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve, to dream up scores of ideas, and to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs.”
All of the steps in building user experience journey maps rely on leveraging empathy. The good news is that with some practice, you can open up your empathy as a researcher and designer. Initially, you should increase open-mindedness by deferring judgement, remaining open to learning and new experiences, and improving listening skills. Next, work to reduce your own biases by recognizing them, accepting what you see and hear, and understanding how the biases shape and filter your perceptions and experiences. Finally, since human-centered design is essentially a social experience, you can refine how you collaborate with research and design participants, seek new experiences related to the design problem, and continually unpack the emotional components of the design problem and experience.
Don Norman recommends three components of emotional design: Visceral: A user’s immediate, instinctual reaction to the product or service. Behavioral: How does the product or service feel when we play or interact with it? How easy is it to use? Reflective: How you make someone feel when they think back to their long-term usage of your product, service, or experience.
You can take the exploration of empathy further, but we’ll refrain here at this time. Continue to research and read on emotional design and empathy mapping.
Steps in Building Maps. There is no perfect path to building a UX journey map, but we can recommend four simple steps as a starting point. These steps generally proceed in linear order but there may be some back and forth between steps to achieve satisfactory results.
Step 1: research and discovery. A critical and often overlooked step in the process is research and discovery. Many mappers want to jump quickly into gathering data, but an organized approach to the process yields improved results later and helps avoid pitfalls. We find it is useful to work with the full team – from clients, customers, consultants, researchers, and some users – to best understand the goals of the mapping and to set some boundaries around the process.
Qualitative research can quickly expand out of control and it is important to have an awareness of your available budget and resources to know how far you can take the work, when enough is enough, and when too much is not helpful. A planful research design, reasonable budget, and even a full proposal written ahead of time can help reduce misunderstandings later in the work and result in an appropriate use of resources.
In addition, the discovery process may uncover prior research or mapping that may significantly expedite the current work. While UX mapping does not have a long history, there are a lot of resources such as related research, published findings, or the experience of others in the field or industry that can inform the work you are about to do. When you feel that you have done your due diligence, only then can you begin to collect data. Often, we like to start with some trial data collection, before expanding and exploring the full spectrum (you can adjust and augment data collection as the project moves along). Finally, record and archive so you can make meaning later in the process.
Step 2: expand and explore. As early data flow in and you continue the data collection process, you can start to build a matrix of touchpoints by element types (action, emotional, cognitive). Again, touchpoints occur at each place in which the user interacts with your design elements, products, or services. You can collect and categorize the touchpoints and start to lay things out graphically. Matrices or grids give space to annotate and show context to the related experiences associated with the touchpoint.
Eventually, user touchpoints, actions, and behaviors will begin to cluster and separate, and you can unpack the experiences and build the stages of engagement. Within each stage there will be further detail as you uncover specific behaviors and activities or even emotional states that signal significant shifts in the experience. Once you are comfortable with the stages, be sure to track details related to the action, emotional, and cognitive elements connected to each stage. Eventually, you can align customer pains, gains, and goals with each of the stages.
A final word of advice is not to be convinced that you have it all figured out too early in the process. Be open to shifting and adjusting your map based on what may originally be hidden. Novelty and surprise are our friends in the world of innovation and design and should not be considered as negatives. What you initially believe a map should look like may not necessarily be what emerges after full exploration.
Step 3 = get visual. From the early notes in matrix or grid form, stories and pictures should begin to emerge. A good next step is to create rough sketches, cartoons, storyboards, or other kinds of visual interpretations of how the parts are coming together. You will need to find an illustrative way to move from the matrix or notes format to a more comprehensive visual representation.
Most of the good maps we have seen or created resulted from a high degree of iteration. As data continues to flow in and the stories get richer, you can refine the maps as data is gathered and synthesized. Eventually, you will begin to notice that the pace of revisions begins to slow down and additional user interviews and experiences are already captured. You may be reaching a point of saturation where new information is providing less and less new understanding. If this is the case, the map may be nearing a final form.
At this point, we like to be sure the early versions of the map, often created as sketches and other drawings, move from analog to digital format. Digitizing the map provides several advantages: it is easier to share, store, and archive digital material; you can apply more advanced illustration and visual techniques; and it is much easier to create multiple versions and retrace your steps in the map building process. Before closing down data collection and visualization, be sure to uncover the stories that exist between the lines of text and graphics, and decide how they can best be expressed. Stories are better communication tools than simple, organized data.
Step 4 = validate, communicate, and put to use. The last step is the most important: creating action based on the mapping. Once a full picture of the map emerges, use further information to validate findings. You can take later versions of the map back to key users, customers, and clients and see if it makes sense. Validate the map before closing down the building process completely. Consider these questions:
- Are there any holes in the map?
- Do user groups have different experiences?
- Do you need a second map or segments?
- Does this all make sense from outside the experience?
- Does it make sense to a first-time reader?
Great maps need little explanation, but most maps require some additional context to make good sense of them. We suggest finding ways to present and share your maps far and wide. There will typically be a single individual or group that are the prime consumers of the map, whether they be the client that hired you, your boss, or a part of the organization that is responsible for providing the user experience, product, or service. They will be most interested in your insights and be the ones mostly likely to plan and take action based on the findings. There are also secondary groups that will be interested in your maps ranging from the users themselves, to map builders, to students of user experience, and many others. Share the maps as broadly as you can within the limits of their original intent and confidentiality.
Finally, take action. Your maps will likely expose opportunities for improvement at least, and may suggest a serious transformation in the user experience at best. In any case, improvement requires change and it is a good idea to follow up the mapping process with a set of recommendations, an action plan, or even more detailed process or product improvement details. These kinds of follow ups can help you chart new courses of action, broaden the user experience, reduce pain, shorten the path to gain, or achieve bigger impacts. Mapping can get you on the course from insight to action.
More on Channels, Personas, and Other Advanced Tweaks. Thus far, we’ve covered the basics. There are, however, a lot of variations and advanced techniques to consider. We do not have the space here to cover the entirety of mapping, but we would like to provide just a little more insight before showing you some examples of some maps that were already built. Here are some more advanced terms and tweaks:
- channels = where the actions take place (live, store, web, email, phone, etc.)
- personas = customer subgroups that likely have different experiences
- other influencers = supporting characters that impact the experience, but may not be part of or under the control of the experience shaper or provider
- gaps = comparing expectations (both of the customer and the provider) versus actual experiences yield insights and opportunities for potential interventions
- pain points = places along the journey that are really negative for the customer or represent very large gaps between expectations and outcomes
And one more thing, Kate Kaplan of the NNgroup, the consulting group headed by Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, published an article in 2016 that gives a really nice general journey mapping template. We like the simplicity of the template and have found that many of the maps we have created or reviewed tend to follow the general patterns identified. You might find this template helpful, especially with your first mapping attempts.
Here are the definitions directly from Kate’s article:
Zone A: The lens provides constraints for the map by assigning (1) a persona (“who”) and (2) the scenario to be examined (“what”).
Zone B: The heart of the map is the visualized experience, usually aligned across (3) chunkable phases of the journey. The (4) actions, (5) thoughts, and (6) emotional experience the user has throughout the journey can be supplemented with quotes or videos from research.
Zone C: The output should vary based on the business goal the map supports, but it could describe the insights and pain points discovered, and the (7) opportunities to focus on going forward, as well as (8) internal ownership.
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