User Experience Journey Mapping What is User Experience?

This month, I am working with a collaborator on the topic of user experience journey mapping. Julie Webb is a design thinking consultant, facilitator, and coach. She focuses her work in education, leading innovation, organizational development, and systems of professional growth. You'll hear more from us in the coming weeks and see a full article by the end of the month.

You can find the full post as well as previous posts on other topics at: https://strategycrafting.blogspot.com/

User Experience (UX) Journey Mapping is a research and design approach that organizations can use to gain insight into the needs and wants of their target audience or customer. The user experience is just that, an in depth look into how an organization’s end users experience its delivery of products or services over a period of time. An organization might choose to create a UX Journey Map when it wants to understand its users’ points of view, including their actions, thoughts, and feelings, with the ultimate goal of enhancing their experience.

History and Background. Thinking and applications of the concepts of a “user” and their “experience” date to the late industrial revolution, particularly as automation and the assembly line created interactions between humans and machine systems. Machine design in automated systems tended to replicate and replace the human experience. For further reading, look to the scientific management method of Frederick Taylor and the later time and motion studies which led to the foundations of industrial psychology and human factors engineering. While few historians may place the origins there, ample evidence can be found in the history of automation if a few conceptual leaps are made. Yet, if we look further we can find foundations of the science of ergonomics back to ancient Egypt and Greece in the design of tools and related jobs.

The information technology revolution had a major influence on the maturation of user experience. As the development of tools spread from industrial applications to information based applications, the pace of exploration and replication of human and machine systems accelerated. This required more data, more studies, and more methods to better understand not only the machine side, but also the human side, of the interactions. As these systems became more complex, designers and researchers sought to understand the parts and the players in IT hardware and software interactions. Eventually, through the 1980s and 1990s, design (of all things) flourished and became a discipline all its own. User experience as a formal concept was ready to emerge.

Needless to say, the tendrils of the future of user experience have a long and varied history. However, it wasn’t until the last two decades that the current concept has solid footing. Many cite the work of Donald Norman who published the book The Psychology of Everyday Things in 1988 that spans the disciplines of behavioral psychology, ergonomics, and design practice. The text used case studies to explore the psychology behind good and bad design, even going so far as to suggest that poor design and the failure of interaction is not the fault of the user, but the lack of good design. The book was revised and retitled as The Design of Everyday Things and has become a best-seller and seminal text for UX designers. UX became a well-understood tool of the designer and spread quickly in the worlds of innovation and design-thinking.

• Key Elements. Quite simply, journey mapping is a visual representation of research that captures experience over time. The UX journey mapping process is comprised of several key elements.
• Phases of the Experience. (often the horizontal axis) The UX process documents the stages, or phases, of the journey that the user goes through as they engage with the organization. These phases articulate the basic steps in order to outline what takes place during the experience. For example, the phases of a bakery purchase might be described using labels such as Search, Enter, Engage, Select, Receive, and Exit.
• Variety of Users/Customers. UX targets a particular customer so that an organization can learn from that customer’s unique point of view. Organizations can benefit from conducting UX research for multiple customers in order to build empathy toward users and identify hidden opportunities for improvement. If the variety of users becomes unwieldy, it may be necessary to use multiple maps.
• Touchpoints. Whether you are designing a product, a service, or an experience, each place that the user interacts with your design elements is a touchpoint. Experience maps should depict these touchpoints and create space to annotate and give context to the experience associated with the touchpoint. Extending this idea, channels are the mediums of interaction between a user and the experience provider (i.e. online, in store, outdoors, via marketing, office, at home, etc.).
• Graphical Representation. The UX journey map incorporates visual components such as timelines, graphs, and icons that represent multiple data points from the UX. This visual graphic synthesizes the data gathered and shows the intersection of information to better represent the experience. This significant information is organized into a format that is more easily digested by different members of the organization.
• Occurs Over Time. The customer experience that is documented during UX research is one that represents the shifts in attitudes, emotions, thoughts, and actions that occur during the different phases of the experience. Although UX research can be conducted at any time, an organization can be strategic about when this research is conducted. For example, UX journey maps could be created representing different times during the year, or they could be generated before and after a particular initiative has been implemented. UX journey mapping from different user perspectives at different points in time can help organizations track how their efforts are being received by the end user.
• Action Elements. Perhaps the easiest data to gather are the actions and behaviors that users take or express as they interact with the products, services, or experiences that make up their UX journey. What actions are customers taking to meet their needs? What are their key behaviors?
• Emotional Elements. UX journey mapping includes the investigation of an emotional layer that customers experience. Users can experience multiple feelings at once and feelings often change at different phases of the experience. Fostering an awareness of a user’s emotional engagement throughout the process can assist organizations in empathizing with their customers and help determine where those emotions are directed, either toward the journey or the people, products, or services provided, for instance.
• Cognitive Elements. In addition to the emotional and action layers of UX, a cognitive layer is comprised of the thoughts users have during their experience. Just like emotions, thoughts cause customers to take actions during each phases of the experience. By talking with and observing customers, UX researchers can gain insight into customer thoughts and their unique points of view.
• Blends Qualitative with Quantitative. The triangulation of data is important when UX journey mapping because the process combines qualitative and quantitative measures. UX researchers gather information through observations, descriptive analysis, user interviews, and the collection of photos and artifacts. This information can be combined with existing data, such as quarterly profits or attendance rates, to provide organizations with a more complete picture.
• Purposeful. UX journey mapping is aimed to enhance experience; it is all about increasing empathy for users by gaining insight into how they interact with an organization. This insight helps organizations take action where it’s needed in order to enhance the user’s ultimate experience.

Some Additional New Vocabulary. Beyond the key elements discuss in great detail above, there are a number of related concepts and new vocabulary that may be of interest:

• Empathy mapping: a technique related to UX journey mapping, is a way to better understand target users, their needs, gains (their personal goals), and pain points (things that make them uncomfortable). A narrower component of UX.
• Visualization: representation of an element or process as a graphic, chart, image or combination to enhance its understanding and communication.
• Personas: fictional individuals or character types that are used to represent groups or segments of users. Different personas are expected to have different experience journeys to a certain degree.
• Channels: where the actions of the experience journey take place (live, store, web, email, phone, etc.); also the pathways through which organizations interact with their customers.
• User interface (UI): the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. A narrow concept than channels.
• Interaction design: an intentional practice of designing products, environments, systems, and services focused on interactions with users. A narrower component of UX.
• Customer experience (CX): the sum of all engagements a customer has with an organization across all touchpoints in all experiences. A broader concept than UX.

In the next post we will discuss the role of empathy in the process, give some general guidance on the steps and sequencing helpful when building a map, and look more deeply at some of the advanced features and techniques that can extend the approach.