What is it?
And how is it useful in UX research?
A user journey map tells the story of an experience with a product or organisation over time.
Journey maps are created to depict milestones and touch points with the user experience, they also help illustrate important intersections between user needs and business requirements.
utilising journey mapping as a ux research tool
I worked on a pregnancy health app whilst working for a healthcare startup, aimed at women in Singapore.
The problem
I began a formative research project, collecting insight about a typical pregnancy through interviews and a diary study. A wealth of data came flooding in, but this created two problems:
How do I centralise the huge amount of qualitative research insight, making it easily accessible and consumable?
How do I translate this data into something that the team can relate to and empathise with?
The solution
Most of the product team had no personal experience with pregnancy. To help them visualise the process and document findings from the research, I decided to create a journey map. I represented the journey as a timeline along one wall of our office, creating a physical space where the team could congregate, discuss, discover, and pose further research questions.
How
Pregnancy is pretty much the ideal scenario for a user journey map as it has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. It’s 100% linear (you can’t deviate or go back!) and there are solid milestones or touch points along the way.
My first research task was to uncover what these milestones were. By interviewing clinicians from a women’s and children’s hospital, I gathered a timeline of hospital visits, health checks, and disease screening appointments.
I then ran in-depth interviews and conducted a diary study with women in each trimester of pregnancy. This helped me to gather detail and map the personal experiences of pregnancy onto the timeline provided by clinicians.
The pregnancy milestones from the study with clinicians acted as the outline of the ‘what’ and ‘when’ for our users. The insights from our pregnancy diaries started to fill that outline with rich detail - emotions, apprehensions, worries, moments of joy, needs, and behavioural responses - the ‘who’ and ‘how’.
An epiphany
This pregnancy product was being specifically designed for women in Singapore and at the start of the project I had reviewed some extant research which provided insight into the cultural practices amongst pregnant women from different ethnic groups residing in this location.
Initially, I wasn’t sure how this data fit with the rest of the experience, without any context I wasn’t sure how relevant or important it was. Through creating the journey map and organising the other research findings into a timeline, I began to see some correlations between these cultural elements and the experience of pregnant women in this location. This gave the journey map and our project the ‘why’, completing the picture of the experience for our users.
The process of creating this map helped to give context and I was able to see how these things had an impact.
The result
The journey map had initially been a place for me to map out the things I was finding out through my research, giving some order and clarity in my mind about how it all pieced together.
However, I quickly realised that it was having the effect of communicating the bigger picture to the whole team.
The journey map wall became our go to place for stand ups and co creation workshops, the team found it easier to talk about and design and build the product with this tapestry of insight nearby to point to and reference.
The map became interactive, when questions arose or gaps in knowledge appeared, the team could pose research questions on post-its that I could then go back over my data to see if I had any insight or plan further research to answer.
And the reach of this work expanded beyond just our team and product development.
Further impact
The map was so large, and full of bright post-its and rich data and imagery that it soon became a stop on the tour for any visitors that came to our office. Our CEO began proudly showing our journey map off to potential clients, confidently talking people through our UX practice and the findings of our research!
Recap
Why journey maps are a useful tool for UX Researchers:
They help centralise user research findings and show connections between data, as well as intersections between business and user needs
They provide a physical space for discussion, questioning, creating, and proposing new research questions
The process of creating a journey map can help with those “ah-ha” moments, understanding the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’, and most importantly, ‘why’
They build empathy with your team, by providing a visual representation of the experience of your users
They can have a wider impact, by demonstrating the ux process to the whole business, reaching stakeholders beyond the product team
My pregnancy journey map, at the Tictrac London HQ