USER JOURNEY MAPPING
Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs. What Users Need will create a set of up to 5 representative user flows and/or storyboards depicting how users will navigate through to the product or service based on approved requirements and user personas.
What is a user journey?
A user journey is a series of steps (typically 4-12) which represent a scenario in which a user might interact with the thing you are designing. They can be used for 2 main things:
- Demonstrating the way users currently interact with the service / website / product
- Demonstrating the way users could interact with the service / website / product
Why should I use a user journey?
There are many benefits to investing time into user journeys:
- Demonstrating the vision for the project – user journeys are a great way to communicate what you are trying to achieve with stakeholders. They show an example of what the future state of whatever it is you are designing could be. Along with personas they can be one of the key outputs from the requirements gathering stage at the beginning of a project.
- They help us understand user behavior – User journeys can help you work out how users are going to interact with your system and what they expect from it.
- They help identify possible functionality at a high level – by understanding the key tasks they will want to do to you can start to understand what sort of functional requirements will help enable those tasks .
- They help you define your taxonomy and interface – By understanding the ‘flow’ of the various tasks the user will want to undertake you can start to think about what sort of taxonomy can help support those tasks and what kind of interface the user will be needing to accomplish them.
- Demonstrating the vision for the project – user journeys are a great way to communicate what you are trying to achieve with stakeholders. They show an example of what the future state of whatever it is you are designing could be. Along with personas they can be one of the key outputs from the requirements gathering stage at the beginning of a project.
When do I create a user journey?
User journeys typically come towards the beginning of a project in the discovery or requirements gathering phase, normally after personas. This is both to visualise the user requirements and help feed into other design activities such as information architecture or wireframing. However, they can also be used further down the line when scoping out pieces of functionality in more detail.
What do I need before creating a user journey?
Before purchasing our user journey you should understand:
- Your user’s goals
- Their motivations
- Their current pain points
- Their overall character
- The main tasks they want to achieve
For additional services on how to capture these attributes please do get in touch and we will talk you through the most suitable to suit your specific business requirments.
