IS6117 Electronic Business Development Project Lecture 4: Journey Maps Rob Gleasure R.Gleasure@ucc.ie www.robgleasure.com

IS6117 Today’s session Journey maps What Why How (a template) When Where Journey map design exercise

Keywords for CV For IS6145/IS6146 Definite Data analysis; data modelling; entity relationship modelling; ERDs; MS Access; Oracle; structured data; unstructured data; semi-structured data; business intelligence Optional R; RStudio; XML; econometrics; text mining; social graphing; NoSQL; predictive modelling; sentiment analysis

Keywords for CV (continued) For IS6117 Definite Design thinking; requirements gathering; human-centred design; interaction design; user experience (UX); personas; empathy maps; journey maps; value curves; mind maps; 6 thinking hats; storyboarding; wireframing; formative testing; summative testing; new product development; new service development Optional Agile software development; lean software development; digital community development; digital marketing

The next next impossible problem We’re trying to improve a linear human experience, each part of which impacts the next, yet much of which is out of our control We need to understand the bigger picture of our users’ experience in and around our interaction

What is a journey map? A journey map is a tool to help you understand the longitudinal experience of your users, before, during, and after they interact with your product/service/system Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/70931762857675702/

What are journey maps Journey maps help us to take our understanding of different personas and link that understanding to different events The journey spells out the different moving parts in a user narrative Combines storytelling and visualisation It’s not about how one internal thought or feeling influences another It’s about how the user is impacted by their interaction with the external world in the course of some activity

Why journey maps Journey maps combine the content of personas and empathy maps and move from static understandings of users to an understanding of users-in-action Ultimately, this sequence is essential to unpack the cause and effect assumptions underlying our interaction design This lets us understand the role of the designable components of an interaction

How to create journey maps We take four basic components as input A persona There may be several personas involved but it should centre upon only one of them An activity This often comes from your empathy map, i.e. a decomposition of the ‘_person_ needs a way to _do something_ because _insight_’ A timeline This can be linear time or a repeating cycle Phase-based timeline are typically better

How to create journey maps We can then lay out our empathy map across this journey. This usually has two part A section describing what happens at each stage What does the persona do? What does the persona say? What does the persona think? What does the persona feel? A section summarising the experience Usually graphs the experience from positive to negative

How to create journey maps We can then layer on three additional details Which of the stages are they interacting with us, as opposed to outside our current reach? What are the major pain points that give rise to most negative experience? What are the ‘moments of truth’ – the times which have most impact on the rest of the journey? From this we get a selections of problems as output What could we be doing better to improve the user journey at each stage?

An example of a journey map Image from https://www.mycustomer.com/experience/engagement/nine-sample-customer-journey-maps-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them

Another example of a journey map Image from https://www.mycustomer.com/experience/engagement/nine-sample-customer-journey-maps-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them

A template for journey maps

When to use journey maps? Journey maps provide a link from empathising to problem definition In terms of empathising, journey maps allow us to understand the role of the environment in making the user feel the way they feel In terms of defining, journey maps identify flawed (and designable) moments in the interaction These provide the first step in moving from the as-is to possible future worlds Journey maps also help during ideation and prototyping, where they are used to visualise alternative, hopefully superior, journeys

Where to use journey maps Journey maps are the third key component for storytelling Personas identify the major characters Empathy maps describe their inner motivations Journey maps describe their ‘arc’ They are therefore created for each persona as a means of extending the empathy map and creating an increasingly nuanced view of the things that make a users the way they are (for better or worse)

Exercise Building on the persona and empathy map you created previously Sketch out a journey map for that persona Break it down into steps What are the phases of an interaction? How do the things a user says, does, thinks, and feels map out against each phase (it’s normal to discover new things here)? How positive or negative is the journey at each phase? Which phases is the user interacting with the system being explored? What are the pain points and moments of truth? What should be improved at each phase?

Reading Interaction Design Foundation: The Basics of User Experience Design (https://www.interaction-design.org/)