How to Run a User Journey Design Workshop

A practical guide to creating effective collaborations, and ultimately a better product

Working as a product designer includes dealing with a lot of complex situations involving stakeholders from various departments — understanding why stakeholders have particular ideas about certain features, disagreeing with some of those ideas, creating alignment on what user problems need to be solved, convincing others of your design direction, and prioritising design tasks, etc.

All of these require constant back and forth communication, which can sometimes lead to misalignment, inefficiency and frustration. I’ve found that one way to remedy these frustrations is the user journey design workshop. In my work, these workshop have become a useful tool in helping create effective collaborations with stakeholders, and have positively impacted the experience of the product in the long run.

What is a user journey design workshop?

The idea is to bring your stakeholders together in one place to discuss your product’s current user journey, create a shared understanding and assess if there are any major user pain points.

A successful workshop has several benefits:

• Reaching a shared understanding about the users and their pain points around a specific use case
• Fostering a collaborative work culture where people learn from each other’s views and opinions
• Building trust among participants
• Stakeholder participation in the improvement of the product from the users’ perspective (rather than “my” perspective)

How to get started?

Step 1 Gather your materials

First, download the three-page worksheet that includes:

• Main use case
• Proto-persona
• Emotional map

Step 2 Define a use case prior to the workshop

It is important to think over the user journey you would like to assess prior to the workshop. It can be one or several journeys.

For instance, let’s assume your company is an e-commerce business providing an online shopping service. You wish to understand how well your current mobile app serves the end-users who are searching for a specific item of clothing. You hope to discover if there are any major pitfalls in the user journey of this particular case.

You can use the main use case worksheet to write the use case like in the example:

Step 3 Building a proto-persona

The first part of the workshop will be spent creating the proto-persona along with the participants. This proto-persona is a hypothetical representation of your company’s target audience, based on assumptions, not real data. This is a helpful exercise in building empathy with who you think the end users are and helping participants to think from their perspective when evaluating the journey.

The proto-persona worksheet should be filled out together, or in multiple groups depending on the number of participants. Try answering some of the following questions:

• What is her name?
• What does she do?
• What are her key personality traits?
• What are important characteristics to keep in mind that could be relevant to your product?
• What is her lifestyle in one quote?

For example, Sarah is an accountant who is a rather pragmatic shopper and doesn’t have strong opinions about fashion.

Step 4 Evaluate the user journey using the emotional map

The second part of the workshop should be spent evaluating the user journey (as defined in the main use case worksheet) from Sarah’s perspective. We will start from the moment she opens the mobile shopping app up until she buys her new pair of shoes, ideally the latest Nike Cortez.

Using your emotional map worksheet, record Sarah’s emotional state as you use the app from her perspective. Ask yourself:

• Did she fulfil the goal successfully?
• In what moments of the journey did your product do well?
• In what moments did your product not answer her needs or wants?
• What were her expectations and were they met?

Step 5 Share Outs and Next Steps

Once you’ve finished the evaluations, share out the results of the emotional map to start an open discussion. Each group should take turns walking through Sarah’s journey and emotional state, checking for similar pain points and discussing potential causes.

The next steps depend on what you had hoped to accomplish. Ideally, you and your stakeholders will come out feeling more aligned around the user problems, and can organise another workshop to generate ideas for improving on the problem areas and positively impact the overall user journey of your product. This can be easily done using low-fi brainstorming tool like crazy 8.

Hope this guide is helpful and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how you handle collaboration with stakeholders!

Download the three-page worksheet

Clementine Jinhee Declercq is a principal designer at Zalando.

Curious to learn more about creating personas? Check out our article on how to tell better stories about your customer.