Fictional Customer Journey Mapping
How storytelling helps us build new experiences and bridge communication gaps
I love working on “journey research,” which is a storytelling tool to understand the real-world journey that our customers go on with our products. My team at Microsoft accompanies our customer recruits through that end-to-end journey, in person. Then I deliver the narrative of their experience back to our organization, so we can use the insights to improve the experience.
This kind of research is great when we have launched a product and want to qualitatively see how we are doing, but what do we do before we launch? What if the product is totally novel and there is no precedent? How can we let the customer’s journey influence our processes and not the other way around? Well, we start by writing a story.
Three steps for crafting a human-centric narrative to improve product development
- The protagonists in this story are the users, each one looking to solve a problem. As a first step to crafting their fictitious journeys, we identify some of their relevant traits, including a supporting cast of people they will interact with along the way.
- Next, we develop an outline. It shows how these characters might learn about a product or service, how they go about buying it, unboxing it, setting it up, and then using it for the first time and beyond.
- Finally, we fill in the outline with specifics such as dialogue, images, and sometimes video, which help us imagine the customer’s experience more completely.
We craft these narrative stories together with the different teams in design, engineering, marketing, retail, support, and more. The narrative can take many forms — a written story in Word, a comic strip in PowerPoint, a flow chart, or a multimedia presentation. Through the creative process, we define an overarching journey for our customer and imagine what success looks like at every stage.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
Not always. The day-to-day realities of multiple teams crafting experiences that are meant to feel coherent and unified can raise some big challenges. Someone working in design might assume that a customer has certain knowledge about a product, for example. Marketing might have another idea entirely about the customer’s journey and what that person should know. Sometimes, in my attempt to craft an ideal customer narrative — or golden path, as we call it — I uncover aspects of current processes that don’t easily conform to the creation of one customer storyline.
The plot thickens: addressing organizational challenges behind customer journey mapping
As a UX researcher, my charge is to provide data and insight to ensure that myriad teams are making customer-informed decisions at each phase of development. If stakeholders within my organization have conflicting ideas about an ideal narrative for the customer’s journey, it’s my job to say, Hey, if we can’t agree on an ideal storyline here, how can we expect the customer to experience one?
In my role working across organizational structures, I try to remember that crisis often leads to helpful change. When my customer storylines lead me to raise tough questions, such as how can we expect the user to know this by now? or is this even the best study to run? I remind myself that the friction I’m causing is necessary. The absence of friction was only made possible by structural gaps that didn’t serve the customer. Someone must uncover these gaps before they can be filled in.
Fictional journey narratives have many uses. They help us design a research plan, develop hypotheses, and get teams to commit to key performance indicators. The stories also function as a qualitative benchmark for the experience a customer will later have. But their real value lies in the conversations and connections that are made throughout the process of creating this shared artifact. The process of its creation forces teams who own discrete parts of the customer’s journey to think deeply about the stages that come before and come after them. It allows us to work together and create solutions.
While this narrative writing approach is an excellent tool for large companies with many silos, it also holds value for smaller companies. Regardless of scale, imagining the customer’s full journey with a product naturally raises the kinds of questions that help us build outside-in organizations. How do people learn about a new product? From whom do they seek opinions? How do they buy? When they’re buying, what do they assume the product can do? Asking questions from the customer’s point of view can help improve the processes and products of every organization that aims to put customers at its core.
How do you use customer journey mapping? Can you imagine using a fictional narrative process in your organization? Let us know in the comments, or tweet @MicrosoftRI!
