Everyone should explore user journeys

If there is one thing Xpdient would recommend to any organisation, it to explore and create user journeys.

What is a user journey?

A user takes a journey when they get something from your organization. For example, they want to go on a training course you provide. During that journey, they interact with you. Each interaction has an outcome in terms of what the user gained, what your organization gained, and most importantly how the user feels about things. Their emotions. By going through the journey with the user, an organization gets insights into how to provide low effort interactions that minimise physical and emotional effort on behalf of the user, leading to more positive experiences. An organization can also discover better ways of providing a service.

How do you create one?

The best way to create one is to have a workshop that includes all the stakeholders in a particular business process and to work through the various stages of the journey on paper.

Each journey has to have the following components

• The person taking the journey. You can develop this person from user personas, the subject of another blog post.
• Stages in the journey. Here you define the beginning and the end points of a journey and the stages in between.
• Touch points. These are the parts of the journey where they interact with your organisation.
• Channels. These are the ways you communicate with the user at each touch point. For example email, telephone, visit, webinar, conference, questionnaire.
• Emotions. This is the emotional stage of the user after a touch point.
• Value. What value did you provide to the user? What value did you provide to the organisation and it’s goals?
• Actions. Things the organisation has to do to provide a low effort experience with high value.

That's quite a lot of things, so doing these journeys really is an effort. But the payoff is huge. By examining these things you see the shortcomings in what you are currently doing and you make your organisation do better.

Xpdient does user persona and user journey workshops for all our clients who require them and we also run the occasional course.

Online you can download free paper templates to create your personas and journeys at Smaply