User Journey

Number of Participants	Facilitators	Category	Duration	Level of Difficulty
3-5	Project Team Members	Define & Test Phase	25-30min	Simple

Description

Customer Journey, „Is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal tied to a specific business or product” NN/g, and in order to be able to visualize and understand this process, it starts with a deep understanding of the user, where at the beginning its looked into why the user is going through this journey in the first place(goals), what motivates them to achieve their goals, this will result in an understanding of what the user goes through, where there are positives and negatives in their journey where does the users pain points, or positive points, another important outcome of this process is that it aligns a multidisciplinary team on the same vision, same understanding of users, and produces an understandable story from the qualitative data, that could be used in many different ways with the stakeholders.

Materials

• Software
  • Whiteboard Software
  • Collaborative Document
• Manual
  • Pens, Paper, Post-Its

Preparation

User Research, Preferably behavioural User research like, Field Studies, Contextual inquires.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Identify a persona
   1. Every Persona should have a different journey map, since they have different goals.
   2. Having the persona, means you already have a collection of the users behavioral data.
2. Choose the Scenario to map
   1. it’s important to pinpoint a clear beginning and a clear end
   2. Noting down the motivations expectations and goals will help in fiding the pain points
3. Journey Phases
   1. Divide the journey of the user into phases, which is an abstraction of the user actions to achieve the goal.
4. List the touchpoints & channels
   1. Identify the main touchpoints (could be focused on your product) at which stage does the user interact with a product.
   2. Identify the channels associated with these touchpoints (medium, environment where a touchpoint happens)
5. List the actual User Actions
   1. Actual behaviors and steps taken by users
6. User Thoughts
   1. list down the Users’ thoughts, questions, motivations, and information needs at different stages in the journey
7. User Emotions
   1. List down the user emotions that result from the thoughts and actions
8. Ideate over Opportunities
   1. ideate over the pain points & other points where the product being designed could make a difference.
9. Team Ownership
   1. Assign the ideated solutions to the appropriate person in the process

Remarkt, Tips, Limitations

• Most effective and best resulting User Journey maps are based on real behavioral data
• Contain no assumptions
• Constatntly validated and refined

Limitations

• Requires continuous maintenance because adjustments in one area might create different interactions and new possibilities
• Requires a lot of data, which makes it time consuming and costly

Strengths: Helps to gain a user-centered view on the product and to find design and usability problems.

Weaknesses: Requires a lot of data. Money and time consuming. Needs continuous maintenance, because adjustments in one are might cause changes in others.

References

James kalbach. 2016. “ Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, 2016.”
NN/g. 2019. “ When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps.” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – Occupied Palestinian Territory. 2019. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/.

Contributed by Yazan Aljaloudi.