Storytelling Generated User Journey Maps

Approaches to Sketchnoting Journey Maps With Individual Users

For my Design thesis here at Carnegie Mellon, I am focused on looking at how to improve customer experience within physical retailers. And while doing research, I was introduced to Chip and Dan Heath’s book called The Power of Moments by my thesis advisor, Peter Scupelli. The book claims that all of us have “defining moments” in our lives and there are certain patterns in these memorable moments. By leveraging the four building blocks of defining moments (elevation, insight, pride, and connection), we can become creators of richer experiences.

What is Duration Neglect & The Peak-End Rule

The Heath brothers also brings in the field of psychology to explain how people ultimately choose or recall the defining moment. There are discrepancies between what people actually experience and what they recall about the experience. Our memories of experiences are very unreliable because we have the tendency to remember and judge an experience based on the “peak” (the best or worst moment) and the ending. Psychologists call this phenomenon the peak-end rule. We also have the tendency to forget things that occur in between peaks and the end in a psychological phenomenon known as duration neglect.

Defining Goals and Roles

For the purpose of my thesis research, I wanted to uncover some of people’s defining moments associated with shopping. I thought it would be interesting to not only find out the peaks and endings of a memorable shopping experience, but also try to surface memories that would otherwise be lost due to duration neglect.

At this point, I believed that user journey mapping is the most similar and appropriate method to what I had in mind. However, in order to achieve the results I was looking for, I would need to modify the way I approached creating the journey maps. Typically, designers create an user journey map after doing a lot of qualitative and quantitative research. Therefore, the map becomes an artifact representative of a collection of insights from a group of user for encountering a product or service. However, I personally wanted to focus on specific individuals reflecting on their memories of a personal experience.

Initially, I designed a booklet that prompted participants to complete a personal journey on their own. These are the 6 steps in the booklet:

1. What is your most memorable shopping experience? Was this a positive or negative experience? Describe it in 1–2 sentences.
2. Describe in more details what happened during this shopping experience on the timeline. (Please mark out at least 8 moments)
3. Looking at the moments you just have identified, circle the key moment that made this overall shopping experience positive or negative.
4. Rate all the moments you have identified as either negative (disliked the experience), neutral, or positive (liked the experience) and explain why. (e.g. Getting to the mall is negative because taking the bus to get to the mall was time consuming)
5. Tally up the numbers of negative, neutral, and positive.
6. Out of the 3 categories, which one did you have the most? Does this category match how you rated the overall shopping experience at the beginning of this exercise? If not, then why do you think this is the case?

The main question asked of the participants is purposefully left opened ended because I wanted to also see what triggered people into labelling something as being most memorable; and in the case of my thesis, it would be a shopping experience.

I presented this booklet to my cohort class, consisting of follow Master of Design student, professor Dan Lockton, and professor Peter Scupelli. After receiving their feedback, I decided to modify the way I approached this journey mapping exercise. Instead of tasking the participants with completing the exercise on their own, I added this as a component to my one-on-one interviews with them. As part of the interview, I would ask the participant to storytell their most memorable shopping experience. And while they are describing the process, I would be sketchnoting what they say as a journey map next to them. This way, I would be able to prompt and ask the participants more questions as they storytell. And this journey mapping process will of course be visible to both of us.

Pilot Testings: An Iterative Design Process

I pilot tested sketchnoting user journey maps during 5 individual participant interviews. After each trial, I modified my approach in drawing out the map based on the previous trial.

Trial #1
For the first participant, I decided to draw the timeline on a tabloid-size paper and write the different key moments they bring up on post-it notes. I assumed that the participant may not storytell in a linear fashion so post-it notes would make it easier to re-arrange these key moments. That hypothesis was true; however, I underestimated how much extra time and effort I needed to write these post-its. Between all the writing, peeling, finding a open spot, and sticking it down, it was difficult to keep up with the speed in which the participant spoke at. I felt really rushed and a bit panicky during the whole experience; to the point where I also couldn’t properly multi-task in asking all the appropriate guiding questions.

The Resulting User Journey Map from Trial #1

Trial #2
Learning from the first trial, I decided to write directly on the tabloid paper with a sharpie and ditch the sticky notes for the second trial. For the majority of the time, this worked out great. I had enough time to both transcribe what was being said by the participant as well as think of questions I would like to ask them. And during the shorter amount of time I needed to finish writing each thought, it left just enough of a pause for the participant to continue to recall in depth about the experience they’re trying to recount. I received so much information that by the end of the session, it got increasingly more difficult to figure out where I was in the timeline. Because all the information was in black, it became harder to annotate things as well.

The Resulting User Journey Map from Trial #2

Trial #3 & #4
Based on the second trial, I decided to introduce a second colored sharpie to allow visual hierarchy. This made it easier to quickly identify things during the exercise. However, the down side was that I got slightly confused at which color was for what in the mists of taking notes. Between trial #3 and #4, I experimented with sketching out things and just purely writing.

The Resulting User Journey Map from Trial #3 & #4

Trial #5
For the final trial, I kept the two different colored sharpies for visual hierarchy. I also tried to added more hierarchy through dividing the information based on the top and bottom halves of the timeline.

The Resulting User Journey Map from Trial #5

Overall Recommended Approaches

I found sketchnoting journey maps with individual users to be extremely helpful. And after running five trials, varying in approaches, I have some recommendations on running your own sessions:

• Use a big piece of paper (e.g. tabloids). Don’t be afraid to use more than one sheet of paper, so make sure to have several sheets on hand.
• Sticky notes are helpful in re-arranging sequence of events; however, they do take more time write and apply. So be aware that a mapping session involving sticky notes may require more time.
• Write in multiple different colored sharpies and assign a different function to each color. For example, I used black to label steps that were taken at a moment in time (e.g. tried on a couple pairs of shoes) and pink to label emotions or anything out of the ordinary associated with the black label (e.g. no correct size available for favorite pair, frustrated).
• Another way, besides using colors, to divide information is to separate using the top and bottom halves of the timeline.
• Have guiding questions (e.g. logical occurrence of events) prepared beforehand and also generate more tailored questions based on what the participant says (e.g. probe them to speak in more details about their claims).
• Participants vary in the amount of information they can recall. For those who recall well, try letting them tell the entire story first before prompting them with more questions based on what they’ve said. For those who have trouble recalling, try guiding them along the journey chronological with questions.

Closing Thoughts & Next Steps

For this exploratory research phase in my thesis, I was most interested in discovering how and why people chose certain memories as their most memorable shopping experience. Therefore, I purposefully left the main question open ended and the structure of the journey map open ended as well. The length and how much details went into each map was formed purely based on what participants could storytell. The only requirement I had was that the story had to have a beginning, middle, and end. Through this, I was able identify a couple of different groups of triggers for people labelling something as being most memorable: some were picked due to a particular item, some due to special events, and some due to specific people.

Moving forward, I am going to repeat this exercise with my participants Spring semester for my generative research phase. However, rather than a component of an interview, I will modify it to be an actual workshop (longer in duration). I will also introduce a more rigid structure for the journey maps: defining key checkpoint moments that all participants have to storytell through. For example, arrival at store, brows through items, trying things on, make final decision, check out, leave store. This way, I will be able to uncover specific pain points and have comparable insights across all participants.