Empathy-Driven Storytelling
Using personas, frameworks, and journey mapping
Introduction
I was on the user experience subreddit and saw a post from someone asking how to communicate a user journey. This is a fairly complex subject as it really relies on a lot of empathy. Without empathy you might design a system for a user that does not exist- or worse, yourself. In this post I’m going to go through the very basics of journey mapping so that when someone asks how to communicate the user journey you will at least have an idea about how to do it. This article provides a high-level overview of empathy-driven storytelling, you can turn to organizations like Adaptive Path for more rigorous methods.
Step 1- Build Personas. It all starts with user data
You can’t create a persona without user data. Well, I mean, technically you can, but there’s a big difference between fabricating a persona using intuition alone and creating one using real data. A persona without user data might as well just be a picture, a name, and a biography. Here’s one I made to illustrate the point:
Pretty bland, right? The point is that user data is what allows you to add the fancy bells and whistles to a (primary, secondary, tertiary) persona. It allows a way to really understand the user in an abstraction of collected user data. Most importantly, however, user data, like that from user interviews, allow you to start building the user story. Here is a fictitious persona that is made with user data.
You get the idea? The more data you have, the more you are able to flesh out your persona. You can begin to find patterns in user behavior that give you insight into the day to day lives of your users. You will have to check out Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin’s guide on building personas for a better explanation. The point I am trying to make is: don’t try to go into building user journeys without at least having a persona. How else will you be able to communicate the user’s goals, behaviors, motivations, and frustrations within the context of the user story? Remember, you will need to be able to back up your decisions with user data in the real world. Don’t go the cheap or easy route here.
Step 2- Build the Narrative
This next step is going to take a lot of legwork, so bear with me. You are going to start to flesh your personas out in a way that will allow you to build empathy. By the end of it, you are going to know what they love, as well as what they hate. You are going to know their deepest fears. You will know the seven words that will make them fall in love. Ok, you get the point.
Time to put on their shoes.
The first thing you are going to do is make a 3x6 column grid. You can have more than 5 rows if you want, but that’s up to you. For the column headers, you are going to put your Persona’s name, Things they Like, and Things They Dislike. On the rows, you are going to put 5 touch-points in the user experience with your product of your choosing. It can be anything as granular as signing up, to as high level as membership qualities. Here is an example of mine using the hacking example from before:
From this chart, you will be able to build a matrix of things that your persona likes and things that they dislike.
You are going to want to build out a narrative for ALL of your personas. This includes your primary, secondary and tertiary personas. The more perspectives you have on the user journey, the more informed your design decisions will be in the long run.
Step 3- Tell the Story
Here is where it all comes together. It’s time to tell the story. Your persona is going to turn in to a super persona.
You are going to start creating a sheet where your journey is visualized in a series of touchpoints. Something like this should do:
This is your journey. Happy you built it? I’m happy for you. Now we’re going to flesh it out so that it actually means something in the context of the user(s).
The second thing we are going to do is put a few sentences above each touch point that will provide insight into the user’s mindset based on the previous exercise. These should only be a few sentences. We are also going to put a small bullet point summary beneath each point to remind ourselves of the purpose of each touchpoint.
The last step we are going to do is place a bulleted list of things that our user(s) find appealing or appalling for when we design the system itself. It’s just good to have this list on hand for making decisions in the future.
If we put it all together, we now not only have a persona, but we have a user journey and a framework as well. These are all guides for communicating the user as well as the user journey. You will be able to use this data to create better experiences that speak directly towards your user.
Next Steps
You can use your journey to start testing, and ultimately build out an Experience Map- testing these different touch points across different users to see if you can find patterns in the user journey. This will allow you to see which areas of the user journey are causing the most friction, stress, or pain for your users. Check out Adaptive Path’s guide to Experience Mapping for a more in-depth explanation.
Conclusion
I cannot stress enough how important it is to spend your time accumulating the user data required to make the most out of this exercise. User Interviews and Surveying are affordable methods of doing this. You can’t build a journey without understanding your user’s behaviors, frustrations, motivations and goals. The journey is, after all, a path towards many different goals. As you can see, the exercise follows a waterfall method where each step contributes to the next. The final piece is an exceptionally powerful tool for informing design, especially if you have them for multiple personas. Furthermore, it will help you build requirements for a product that are tied to user needs.
There are many different ways to do this exercise, so feel free to tinker with it as you see fit. The example I’ve offered here is just a simple three-step plan, but there are many ways to conduct empathy-driven storytelling besides this one.
