Intro to User Journeys
Continuing our multi part series on Intro To UX
This week’s topic touches upon User Journeys. In the “Define” stage, you’re trying to nail down a couple of things. For one, what is the exact problem you’re trying to solve? And how would this solution work exactly? What are the steps that a user will go through when they use your product or service? Answering all these questions will give you a solid foundation on which to build a solution. So let’s jump right in!
Defining the Problem
Stop! Before you begin firing up Sketch and building out your beautiful designs, take a pause. Do you know what you’re trying to solve in the first place?
Without clearly defining what you’re solving, and for whom — your product might be doomed from the start. Good problem definitions are specific, narrow in scope and can clearly articulated. A great problem statement alludes to intentionality, and spawns a focussed approach. Too much vagueness is the bane of any product. It leads to delays, inconsistent implementation, and unpredictable user experiences. Check out this interesting read around defining problems for your projects:
Using Your Research
So you’ve done your research and collected lots of insights. The next step is to distill all that research into an archetype of a user. These “personas” will help guide your design process by focussing you on who the solution is for. We gave some detail around User Personas and Research in our last series, so check that out if you haven’t here. For more details on personas and how to make them, check out these useful reads from around Medium:
What is a User Journey?
A User Journey refers to the process of mapping out your Persona as they interact with your product. It lays out all the points in time where your product “touches” a customer, and if possible, how they feel at that point. Human emotions are a fickle thing. Figuring out where people have a bad emotional experience is of great value. It gives you a place to focus your design efforts. “Human Centered Design” is all about putting your User at the center of your universe. It’s also about designing around them and their needs.
Usually, people will map out a rough User Journey before the solution — what it looks like today. Once you layer on the Research you’ve done onto this journey, you being to distill the problem. Here is where you will identify pain points — areas where the experience breaks down. Hopefully, these pain points will give you insight into what features your solution will ultimately contain. There’s many many ways to visualize journeys, one of our favorites is linked below:
Aside: Service Design Blueprints
You’ll notice the term Service Design & Service Design Blueprints more and more these days. And this is as good a place as any to give you a brief aside about it. A Service Design Blueprint is a map of everything that goes into delivering a moment of your User Journey. It allows you to visualize the components that go into delivering a seamless User Experience. Often times, some of these factors are invisible to begin with. It contains information around organizational actors, systems used and data collected, to name a few.
The folks over at the Practical Service Design publication have great resources should you like to learn more. You can find one of their articles that we think does a great job of explaining the differences between Journeys and Blueprints, along with a link to the publication below.
This article was written by Sahej Locham for ello
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