IS4445 Principles of Interaction Design Lecture 4: Journey Maps

1. IS4445Principles of Interaction DesignLecture 4: Journey Maps Rob Gleasure R.Gleasure@ucc.ie www.robgleasure.com

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 Image from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/70931762857675702/

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

13. 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

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), 10-13. • 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 (https://www.interaction-design.org/)