As discussed in my previous posts, redesigning and optimizing a site to best fit your users’ needs is a continuous process of testing and learning. Once the quick and easy data has been gathered, it may be time to take the next step into more intensive testing. Journey maps are a common UX research method that can provide deeper insight into your user’s experience.
What Is a Journey Map?
To reference UX Methods: A Quick Guide to User Experience, James Pannafino and Patrick McNeil define journey maps as “a visual timeline of a customer’s experience as they work towards a goal”. While the focus can be a customer’s buying experience, journey maps can come in all shapes, sizes, and formats for a variety of reasons. When done properly, a journey map combines storytelling and visualization to better immerse designers into the client experience.
At this point in your research, you want to identify a type of user you would like to profile and go into the field to observe them. The goal is to discover all the steps the user goes through in order to achieve a given goal, what obstacles they encountered, and most importantly, how they felt during each step.
In its most basic form, the process of a journey map begins by collecting a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the user’s thoughts and feelings are integrated in order to build a narrative. This narrative is then condensed and polished, delivered as a visualization in its final form.
Key Components
Regardless of the research being conducted, almost all journey maps have five key elements:
1. User
The user is who the journey map is about, from their point of view. Users usually align with the personas used earlier in the design process. It’s important to make sure you are selecting a user from your target demographic to ensure the best results.
Gather and analyze all available information about your target audience:
Interview your real and potential users
Conduct contextual inquiry
Analyze the results of user surveys
2. Scenarios and Expectations
This section describes the stages the user goes through and their emotional experience at each step of the process. The scenario describes the situation the journey map addresses and is associated with the user’s goal or need and specific expectations. These scenarios can be real or anticipated.
3. Touchpoints
Touchpoints are user actions and interaction with the product/service/website. They provide organization for the rest of the data collected throughout the journey map. It is important to identify all the main touchpoints and all main channels associated with each touchpoint. For example, a touchpoint for a user using IMDb may be “steam a movie” and the channels can be “sign up” or “rent”.
4. Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions
What motivates your user to interact with your design? The behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the user through the journey should be mapped out across each phase. Actions are the actual steps taken by users. This component should be a narrative of steps taken during a phase. Mindsets represent a user’s thoughts, questions, and motivations at different stages. Emotions are plotted along a single line across journey phases, literally representing the emotional “ups and downs” of the experience. Pain points can also be identified alongside emotions and actions.
5. Opportunities
Finally, opportunities are gained insights from mapping; they reveal how the user experience can be optimized.
Once all of this information is gathered, the visualization is typically presented as a horizontal flow from start to finish with indicators of key elements illustrated on each step. A journey map is not meant to be a flow chart, but rather a visual artifact of a user’s mental model and resulting emotions. The best results come from journey maps observed in real time from real users, but they can also be created based on existing data; the goal is to further explore the user’s full experience and convey that information in a memorable concise way that creates a shared vision.
Journey mapping is a process that provides more extensive insight into the user experience by uncovering what currently works for the user and what causes them frustration. Does successfully, this method can reveal opportunities for improvement, strengthen the team’s design process goals, and, ultimately, create a better experience for your users.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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