1. IS4445 Principles of Interaction Design Lecture 4: Journey Maps
Rob Gleasure

2. Course structure Or more specifically Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Empathise 1 (personas)
Week 3: Empathise 2 (empathy maps)
Week 4: Define 1 (journey maps)
Week 5: Define 2 (value curves)
Week 6: Ideate 1 (mind maps)
Week 7: Ideate 2 (6 hats)
Week 8: Prototyping 1 (storyboards)
Week 9: Prototyping 2 (wireframes)
Week 10: Test 1 (Testing cards)
Week 11: Test 2 (UX audits)
Week 12: Revision

3. IS4445 Today’s session Online discussion Journey maps What Why
How (a template)
When
Where
Journey map design exercise

4. Online discussion How did everyone get on?
What interesting empathy maps went up?
Bug reports
Zooming may make pdf window disappear - outstanding
Need an option to change screen name and group name - outstanding
Anything else weird or not working?

5. 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

6. 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
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7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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?

12. An example of a journey map
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13. Another example of a journey map
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14. A template for journey maps

15. 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

16. 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)

17. Building your report
Pick one persona and empathy map (it doesn’t have to be the same one from last week)
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?

18. Reading
Richardson, A. (2010). Using customer journey maps to improve customer experience. Harvard Business Review, 15(1), 2-5.
Howard, T. (2014). Journey mapping: A brief overview. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2(3),
Clark, K., & Smith, R. (2008). Unleashing the power of design thinking. Design Management Review, 19(3), 8-15.
Interaction Design Foundation: The Basics of User Experience Design (