How Focusing on Audience Needs Makes Us Better Public Servants
Using Personas and Journey Maps to Create Better Content and Design Better Programs and Services
Editor’s Note: Jessica MacQueen is a Content Strategist with Alberta Advanced Education. Trained as a professional wordsmith with a Master’s Degree in English Literature, she is building her organization’s capacity to create killer content that engages and encourages Albertans to pursue education and training after high school. She also actively participates in cross-government user experience groups and engages in conversations around digital government and human-centred design.
Working as a Content Strategist for Alberta Advanced Education, I’ve spent the past few years acquiring allies in my mission to bring audience needs to the forefront of our organization’s conversations around digital content. Fortunately, many of my colleagues intuitively get that focusing on audience when developing content makes sense.
So why does it sometimes feel like a seismic shift is needed to get government to put people at the centre of any design process?
I’m guessing this difficulty has something to do with how hard it is to push change through a complex system. Whether you’re talking content strategy or design thinking, these methodologies that centre around an audience, or user, don’t always integrate easily into the existing ways government works — they necessitate transformation.
Fostering audience awareness in government
My role is dedicated to digital content, and the foundation of any effective content strategy is a recognition of audience. As such, I face the dual challenge of raising the profile of content within existing web development processes and integrating awareness of audience needs into how we work.
I need to get people on board with thinking about content differently: not as a side-of-the-desk project or something you create at the end of a website build to fill text boxes, but rather as a guiding priority that shapes the product being created and warrants just as much planning and forethought.
Prioritizing content entails bringing audience needs into focus at the beginning of any development process. This means when someone wants to create a new website, tool, or piece of content — or improve something that already exists — we start with a conversation about audience.
User personas and journey maps are helpful tools for facilitating these conversations.
Defining audience with personas
Personas are reliable and realistic representations of key audience segments. They enable us to synthesize insights from user research into concise, usable profiles that make talking about user needs easier.
For instance, when my team points to our persona of David as a shorthand for the segment of Alberta high school students who are undecided about whether to pursue post-secondary education, we draw upon a common understanding of this segment’s motivations, goals, and challenges.
Personas ground my team’s conversations about content development and outreach planning by ensuring that we’re on the same page about who we serve, and what we know about their needs.
How we created personas for Learning Clicks
We run an outreach program called Learning Clicks that supports Albertan youth in planning for post-secondary. We wanted to build personas for our various audiences, and we knew it was important to conduct user research so that we weren’t operating on assumptions or stereotypes.
So we conducted user research via phone interviews, surveys, field work, and secondary research to learn all that we could about our various youth audiences: their influencers, challenges, motivations, goals, preferences for accessing information etc.
After doing all that research, we needed a tool to condense our insights so they’d be communicable and easily understood. We chose to use the free persona template offered by Xtensio. We built up a suite of personas representing our primary audiences, and we now use them as tools to communicate with colleagues and to help guide project planning.
We’ve found personas immensely helpful in guiding our team’s transformation towards a human-centred approach to outreach delivery and content strategy. We feel better equipped to create useful, usable content and improve our outreach efforts because our decisions are informed by a strong understanding of who we serve.
Putting personas through the journey mapping process
While personas are valuable tools for supporting conversations about audience needs, the insights they offer are compounded when put through the journey mapping process.
A journey map is a visual representation of the path a person takes through a process. It tells the story of someone’s experience getting from A to B, and captures information about their behaviour, emotions and pain points, as well as the various touchpoints they have with an organization.
A quick Google search will introduce you to journey mapping, but you may want to start with this UX Mapping Cheat Sheet or this overview of How to Run an Empathy & User Journey Mapping Workshop.
Building journey maps for Learning Clicks
My team drew from Adaptive Path’s experience mapping guide and other resources to build journey maps for each of our personas. We held workshops with Learning Clicks Ambassadors to walk our personas through the post-secondary planning process.
Through this exercise, we identified our organization’s various touchpoints with each persona, assessed the quality of each persona’s experience based on research and feedback we’d collected, and surfaced opportunities for improving our content and enhancing our audience’s overall digital experience.
It was important for us to identify the other service touchpoints that our audience has so that we could start working towards improving the comprehensive omni-channel experiences for students we serve. We’re now looking at ways to better align our in-person resources, print publications and web content across multiple websites to facilitate a more seamless experience.
Transforming Student Aid with journey mapping workshops
Happily, it turns out we aren’t the only ones in our organization that have caught on to the value that personas and journey maps offer. I had the opportunity to support a series of workshops for Alberta Student Aid that employed these tools, driven by their business transformation initiative.
Facilitated by a digital project manager and a UX expert, the aim of these workshops was to get the various teams that comprise Student Aid to come together around a common purpose: assessing the user experience of their programs and services (including their website) and finding ways to improve it.
Insights from staff and usability testing were compiled to paint a comprehensive picture of user experience and identify where it was falling short. In the culminating session, the facilitators helped the team craft a vision for what a digital transformation of Student Aid could look like.
Bringing audience awareness to the rest of our organization
Following on the success of the Learning Clicks and Student Aid persona and journey mapping exercises, I’m hopeful that this attention to audience will keep building. Fortunately, the appetite and capacity for methodologies like content strategy, UX and human-centred design or design thinking, is growing in the public sector.
My team is now fielding requests from other colleagues to provide support in building their capacity for audience awareness by using these tools. We have a vision of building up a suite of personas and journey maps for our entire organization — a collection that tells the comprehensive story of the people we serve, with the express purpose of facilitating conversations about how to better serve their needs.
Human-centred design makes us better public servants
When my team employs personas and journey maps to support conversations around content development or outreach enhancements, we model a human-centred approach to our work. We’ve experienced firsthand how fostering empathy and awareness of audience needs enables us to create better content and design better outreach programming.
By building a collection of personas we can synthesize our user research and access it readily. By mapping out a persona’s journey through a complex system or process we can start to pinpoint what exactly isn’t working — and propose feasible solutions.
When you start with audience needs, establish a shared language and common understanding of user experience, and are able to clearly identify pain points and opportunities for improvement within large, complex systems, transformation starts to feel achievable.
