Mapping the experience

By Adam Hardy

The User Experience Design team here at Foviance is evangelical about taking a holistic approach to design. Because we are increasingly engaged in projects that span multiple channels, a holistic approach enables us to understand the wider context in which a particular project sits. Understanding how and why people move between channels during their interaction with an organisation allows us to identify pain points, overlaps and opportunities for improvements or efficiencies. The big picture view of a problem allows us to spot and tackle causes rather than symptoms that may be manifesting themselves in individual channels.

Even projects that focus on a single touchpoint – such as an organisation’s website, or even one component of its website – benefit from approaches that take account of the broader context of people’s interactions with it. This broad view of interplay with a particular system allows us to identify opportunities to engage with individuals earlier and more often in their journey through a problem space, meeting more of their needs and increasing their level of engagement with the organisation.

For example, while using a holistic approach to redesigning a science information website, we discovered that many science teachers use YouTube to find demonstration material to liven up their lessons. It turned out that the client already produced information videos and that simply putting them on YouTube was likely to increase their engagement with a key portion of their target audience.

We have talked in previous articles about methodologies in our toolbox that can be considered holistic in their approach (for example scenario-based design; mental models). User journey mapping is another such technique that we find very useful (and complementary to these other techniques). A user journey map visually represents the experience that a person has with a system. I have noticed some user experience consultancies using this term to describe the mapping of a user’s experience within the limits of a single system, such as a website. For example, the journey map starts with the homepage and ends when the user exits the site. We prefer to explore the much wider experience that a person has. Our journey maps include all customer touchpoints while also capturing the decision points, mental processes, motivations and emotions of the user as they travel along their journey of interactions with the organisation. They extend to include the events leading up to the awareness of a need, consideration of options for fulfilling that need, selection between competing services and so on.

The creation of a user journey map is, of course, a people-focused process. We draw on an array of user research techniques determined by particular requirements, such as the problem space, the client, and the target audience demand. For example, recent projects have employed combinations of ethnography, contextual interviews, diary studies, surveys and web analytics. This demonstrates one of the attractions of user journey mapping (and indeed other visualisation techniques): they can make a large amount of disparate data easily digestible.

The user journey map is a tremendously valuable tool. Firstly, the actual process of researching and visualising the map gives the team or individual responsible an in-depth understanding of the problem space. But more importantly, the output makes this level of understanding accessible to all who view the finished map. As with our other visualisation techniques, the map then becomes a key design tool that can be used throughout the project and by the whole project team.

This article was written as part of the crossing the channels of experience March newsletter