Unpacking Features with User Journey Mapping
At Philosophie, we’ve been working with a big client on a SaaS product for smaller companies. I worked with Brooke Kao and Jamie Caloras to create a large product ecosystem with several relevant personas and a spiderweb of interconnected features and scopes…
…With very little validation that we were actually solving a problem.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. We had brought in people who fit our target user to strengthen our persona and iterate on our product — more later about user recruitment because that was a huge hurdle! But we needed more to prove the value of what we had build.
Research sprint
It was really a sprint.
We worked with a company in Michigan; we shadowed their employees, asked lots of awkward questions and wore some pretty awesome safety jackets. We were coming home. We had obsessively scribbled pages of notes, hours of Go-Pro footage and neon orange T-shirts to prove it.
It was Shackletonian — it was a true research expedition and we cataloged everything we did, everything our users did. We poured ourselves into their shoes and worked to understand how they think, what they see every day, what gets in their way. And we walked away with binders of notes and lots of questions.
Now, we needed a way to understand if what we had built before fit into the day to day experience of the users we had talked to. What solved their pain points? What remained unsolved?
Creating the journey
Shahrzad Samadzadeh of Cooper explains the sheer awesomeness of user journey mapping:
A customer journey map is a versatile tool that can serve many purposes: mapping how a current customer experience unfolds over time, planning the orchestration of a future experience across touchpoints, or uncovering business opportunities in the form of unmet customer needs.
As a group, we mapped the tasks and paths a user would take both in and out of a product to reach a goal. In this case, we looked at how employees communicated before, during, and after a service call.
We started with our two primary personas bisecting the whiteboard and wrote out how they complete tasks in the scenario (aqua and blue pen). We wanted to highlight the edge cases (orange pen), existing technology (yellow post-its), questions (periwinkle post-its), and most importantly, pain points (small pink post-its). With all that information mapped out from our notes, we had a full frontal view of the day in the life of an employee at our pilot company.
But how do we know what to do next? How can we find out if what we had built helps our new users? Have we solved anything?
Let’s look at this pain point: Our persona, Joe, doesn’t have a part he needs on a job and doesn’t know who to call.
In hopes of finding a match, we mapped each existing feature to the step in the user journey that the feature would solve (long blue post-its).
But we still had pain points that remained. So we ideated potential new features (long pink post-its) that could solve pain points that weren’t addressed by the existing features.
Finally, we marked each feature with a yellow dot for each pain point it addressed.
For Joe, we hadn’t yet designed a solution to his pain point so we came up with a high level feature solution:
Joe should be able to search for a part and see which people have the part and are nearby.
That particular solution also solved a few other pain points so it made the cut when we prioritized features. Speaking of prioritizing features…
Prioritizing features
With an hour and a half of work on a user journey and 30 minutes of matching features and ideating new ones, we had an impromptu but clear hierarchy of what to do next.
From there, we used a Cynefin-based framework to further narrow down the scope of our work: mapping features on a matrix from Unknown -> Known by Unimportant -> Important. I’m sure Chris Butler would love to tell you more about this process!
With this process of user journey mapping and prioritization, we confidently moved forward with engineering spikes and design prototypes to dig into the unknowns and truly solve our users’ pain, knowing that we were moving in the right direction.
Treating a user journey and their pain points as a source of truth similar to a user persona is a great way to better understand the value and priority of potential new features. By constantly refocusing our energies on these sources of truth, we focus on what is really vital to the user.
