Google UX Design Course. User Stories and User Journey Map
Course 2 of 7 / week 2
In a previous article, I shared my experience of building an empathy map, identifying pain points, and creating personas for a job search application. In this article I will tell you what the user story and a user journey map are.
User story
A user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from a persona’s point of view to inspire and inform design decisions. Some designers refer to these as scenarios or user cases, they mean the same thing.
User stories prioritize design goals. If you have a lot of user needs to consider, user stories, determine which ones are the most critical to resolve.
To write a user story, we follow this simple formula. As a type of user, I want to action, so that benefit. Type of user describes who we are designing for. Action is what the user hopes will happen. And finally, benefit is why the user wants the action to happen.
Here are two examples of my user story for a job search app:
User journey map
A journey map is an illustration of what the user goes through to achieve their goals. Creating a user journey map lets you thoroughly document the entire sequence of events and interactions a user experiences, including the user’s interaction with your design. That way you can really focus on how a specific persona, not you, thinks and feels at every step of the journey.
- To start, identify the first task the user needs to complete.
- The next action in mapping a user journey is describing all the smaller things the user must accomplish before graduating to the next main task.
- The third action in mapping a user journey is identifying the user’s likely emotions as they go from task to task.
- Once we’ve identified the user’s emotions, we can then identify opportunities to improve his user experience. This is where user journey mapping can really enhance UX design.
Here are my examples of User Journey Map:
It’s been a fascinating journey through the second week of this course and I’m glad to be able to share it with you. See you soon.
