An overview of mapping techniques used in UX Design Process
Mapping is one of the most effective ways of presenting your findings and insights to your team and stakeholders.
UX mapping is a process that narrows the gap between users’ or customers’ needs and the product. It’s important to capture the whole picture before you start building or even designing.
Maps are great tools to
- present our findings and insights in one place
- align the team and stakeholders around the problem space
- see the knowledge gaps and unknowns
UX designers have a wide range of types of mapping they use, each with different goals and different processes.
Ecosystem Maps
UX practitioners use ecosystem maps to understand the objects in a system and account for all key interactions that will be affected by adding a new product or service. Ecosystem maps capture all people, products, and services within the problem space.
A UX ecosystem is a set of interdependent relationships that emerge between components within an information environment. — Dave Jones, Design for a Thriving UX Ecosystem,
The components outlined by Dave Jones include the people, their goals and practices, the digital and analog technologies that are used by these people to connect and share information, and the information that is shared. Ideally, an ecosystem map should also include known pain points at all levels (who, what, when, where, and how).
Nobody works alone, and UX designers need to learn more about the relationships users maintain with other people and technologies. An ecosystem map can help you identify new relationships that allow you to create and grow your products more effectively.
Benefits of Ecosystem maps
- They give us the big picture
- They help us anticipate problems and needs the client may not see.
- They help us uncover important details the client didn’t mention.
- They help us clarify our understanding so we don’t make any wrong
- They give us the basics for creating context scenarios and user personas
More resources on ecosystem maps:
https://www.uxbooth.com/, https://uxmag.com/, https://spin.atomicobject.com/
Empathy Map
An empathy map is a tool used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes user knowledge in order to 1) create shared understanding and 2) aid in decision making.
It is a useful tool that helps teams better understand their users. Empathy mapping is a simple workshop activity that can be done with stakeholders, marketing and sales, product development, or creative teams to build empathy for end-users.
Traditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or persona in the middle. Empathy maps provide a glance into who a user is as a whole and are not chronological or sequential.
The “Says” quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability study. Ideally, it contains verbatim and direct quotes from research.
The “Thinks” quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience. Pay special attention to what users think, but may not be willing to vocalize. Try to understand why they are reluctant to share — are they unsure, self-conscious, polite, or afraid to tell others something?
The “Does” quadrant encloses the actions the user takes. From the research, what does the user physically do? How does the user go about doing it?
The “Feels” quadrant is the user’s emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context. Ask yourself: what worries the user? What does the user get excited about? How does the user feel about the experience?
Empathy maps are most useful at the beginning of the design process, after the initial user research.
Benefits of empathy mapping:
- Empathy mapping allows us to capture who a user or persona is. It can be used to analyze qualitative research, discover gaps in your current knowledge, and create personas.
- Empathy maps are the best tools to communicate a user or persona to others by illustrating user attitudes, behaviors, and pain points.
https://www.interaction-design.org/empathy-maps https://www.nngroup.com/articles/empathy-mapping
Experience Maps
Experience Mapping is used for visualization of an entire end-to-end experience that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It follows a chronological order and is not tied to a specific product or service. Experience maps generalize the concept of customer-journey maps across user types and products. An example of the experience map is the Pregnancy map.
Experience maps are typically used before you even start designing a product. Here, they help a company understand how potential users solve their problems without your product — this helps you identify opportunities in your own design to smooth out and solve painful experiences.
Benefits of Experience maps
- They help you see the big picture of your customers’ journey to further understand their needs and pain points.
- They make collaboration between designers, developers, and managers easier, more effective, and focused.
- They facilitate desired outcomes by pinpointing and minimizing negative customer experiences.
- They identify the reasons for churn, addressing them and creating the opportunity to bring users on board again.
- They allow businesses to prioritize actions in their experience strategy and product timeline.
Experience Maps and Journey Maps are very similar. The only primary distinction is that experience maps are not affiliated with a specific product or service. They highlight general human behavior, like child development, pregnancy.
Resources on Experience maps:
Scenario Maps
A user scenario describes a basic story of an action or goal that a user wants to accomplish.
When writing a scenario, it’s best to use a specific persona as the actor carrying out the scenario. For example, a scenario might outline how Debbie books a hotel room for her business trip.
User scenarios are a great way of communicating the key tasks a user will perform with a system. Scenarios are usually centered around one task that is key to your product and include 5 elements:
- an actor
- a motivator
- an intention or intent
- an action
- a resolution
Scenario mapping is a group exercise that helps your design team think about how your persona segments might approach an activity using your product or service and ideate around the type of experience you want to provide for them, producing candidate solutions for the future design.
This activity should be done fairly early in a project to explore ideas that will influence user flows, features, and UI design.
More about Scenario maps and how to run a scenario mapping workshop:
http://www.uxforthemasses.com/scenario-mapping https://www.nngroup.com/scenario-mapping
Customer/User Journey Map
A user journey is a timeline of user actions that describes the relationship between your brand and its customers. It’s a visual representation of a user’s interactions with your product from their point of view.
User journey mapping creates a timeline of all touchpoints between a customer and your organization, including all channels in which they happen. It visualizes how a user interacts with a product and allows designers to see the product from a user’s point of view.
Journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user goals and actions into a timeline skeleton. Next, the skeleton is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a narrative. Finally, that narrative is condensed into a visualization used to communicate insights that will inform design processes.
Journey maps help us pinpoint specific customer journey touchpoints that cause pain or delight. They are a great technique to empathize with users and to create one shared understanding of the customer journey.
Journey mapping can be done based on research or hypothesis.
There are 5 key components of a journey map:
- Actors (Personas)
- Scenario + Expectations
- Journey Phases
- Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions
- Opportunities, insights
Current-state vs future-state journey maps
Current-state journey maps represent the existing experience. They are used for reinventing journeys and conceiving new experiences.
Future-state journey maps are the future ideal experience highlights and are used for identifying existing problems and solutions.
Additional resources:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-map-digital-template/ https://www.nngroup.com/journey-mapping/
https://www.interaction-design.org/customer-journey-maps https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-faq
Service Blueprints
First introduced in 1984 by G. Lynn Shostack in the Harvard Business Review, service blueprint diagrams visually map out the steps in a service process, making it easier to design a new process, or to document and improve an existing one.
Service blueprints capture the user experience alongside business processes.
A customer journey map focuses on what customers experience when they interact with a service or business, from specific actions or touchpoints to pain points. Service blueprints go several steps deeper and combine the customer’s experience with all employee actions and support processes that may or may not be visible to the customer.
Service blueprints are most often used to understand and improve the service, design a new service, understand the actors in a service (customers, suppliers, consultants, employees, teams, etc.)
Benefits of Service Blueprint
- It gives an organization a comprehensive understanding of its service and the underlying resources and processes — seen and unseen to the user — that make it possible. Focusing on this larger understanding provides strategic benefits for the business.
- It helps businesses discover weaknesses. Poor user experiences often happen because of an internal organizational shortcoming — a weak link in the ecosystem.
- Blueprinting exposes the big picture and offers a map of dependencies.
- Blueprints help identify opportunities for optimization. The visualization of relationships in blueprints uncovers potential improvements and ways to eliminate redundancy.
- It is most useful when coordinating complex services because it bridges cross-department efforts.
More on how to create Service Blueprints:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/service-blueprints
https://servicedesigntools.org/
All the UX mapping techniques help us create a shared image of our knowledge and have an aligned mental model. Mapping activities are bringing teams together and are great collaboration activities that make teams stronger and decisions better.
During the UX process, based on your goals and process stages, multiple mapping methods can be applied. This can also work as a triangulation, that will affirm our insights and will allow us to create an in-depth understanding of our users and organization.
Another great resource to learn more about UX mapping is “Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams” book by Jim Kalbach.
