Working Together: User Journeys
Having created 7 great user profiles, Digital Wonderlab suggested the next step was to hold a workshop to look at some user journeys. Having had fantastic input from carers in our user profile sessions, we decided that we’d include them in this session too, something we hadn’t done in previous user journey work. Despite having some knowledge of doing this, we found that there is definitely more than one way to plot a user journey, which led to a lot of learning! Laura and I discuss what we learned below:
Why map user journeys?
Laura: User mapping has benefits for both the end user and your organisation. It helps you gain a greater understanding of how the users will interact with your website. It is also a great opportunity for the team to discuss how a process, such as event booking, could be streamlined to make their user experience better. This also helps to identify if there is any new functionality that needs to be incorporated into the site, such as donations.
We often see many teams working in silos, which can result in the duplication of process, often manual, as people fail to talk to others outside their team due to lack of time. This is therefore a great chance for multiple teams to come together to discuss their processes, identify where they are having challenges and explore how digital could make life easier not only for the end user but for the teams internally.
Janine: The user profiles we created are great in really focussing us on what users want to do, but how can we make the site work in a way that enables them to do this? What things do they need to know along the way? Having space to sit down and think about the tasks users complete on the site, and the steps they need to go through is so helpful. It ensured we captured each of these steps, and didn’t assume anything. It helped us realised how many steps, and how much information, were missing from the current website! It also helped reinforce what the new site needs to deliver for our users — and by this I don’t just mean carers, I mean any user on our website. They all have different things they come to our website for, and this process really helped us understand what steps they need.
User profiles help the digital partner too!
Laura: For us it allows us to drill deeper into some of the processes that we touched upon during the user profiling sessions. It gives us the time to unpick a problem, with the team, so we can agree how we can improve the process for the end user. It’s a time to challenge the organisation’s thinking and make sure the user profiles we have identified are always being considered.
When and how do you map user journeys?
User journey mapping comes after user profiles once you have identified all the different audience groups. They help to inform the key journeys that need to be wireframed so you will want to make sure all the journeys you have identified are mapped out before beginning wireframes
There are many different ways to map user journeys and there are some great resources out there such as IDEO’s design kit which you can use. Exploring the current journey can help the team gain clarity of their existing processes, which have changed organically overtime without their knowledge.
What’s it like mapping user journeys?
Janine: I’ll be honest, we found the user journey mapping hard! Really valuable, but hard. I think there were 4 reasons for this:
- Not getting the right people in the room. We didn’t really understand the value of this session, and so didn’t plan well enough in advance, or give enough detail, to ensure the right representation within the organisation at the first session we had. Thankfully, we had a carer in the room who saved the day and we were able to go back to the user journey to tweak and improve it, but next time round I would definitely focus on getting the right people in the room, with the right understanding of the session, from the off.
- Viewing a user journey like a site map. I think part of our challenge was that I felt like we were creating a site map of the pages people would see and visit. It took me a long while to realise that’s not what it is! It’s more the flow of information they need — which may all be on the same page, or might be on different pages. But what do they need to know and in what order to be able to achieve the goals they have? Had we grasped this from the start we might have found the whole thing a lot easier!
- We got bogged down in the detail. Possibly because we didn’t have the right people in the room. Or maybe because we were viewing the output of the session all wrong. Whatever the reason, there were a number of times when we got bogged down in the detail of a particular process and what does/does not; should/should not happen. Reflecting back, we should have identified this as a part of the process we weren’t sure of and moved on more quickly. It can be easy to spend hours and hours looking at every user journey for every action, but with limited time and resource — both internally and from a digital partner, it’s important to make the most of workshop time together. Finding ways to quickly move past blockers, yet also ensure there is the opportunity for everyone in the room to speak, are key to making this sort of workshop activity a success.
- Not having enough time. Probably due to the detail issue above! But we definitely didn’t have enough time to go through all of the user journey’s we wanted to. Fortunately, we were working with a partner who looked to immerse themselves in our world, and really understand what we were trying to do. This meant Laura could take our discussions and extrapolate out other user journeys using the knowledge she had. We also ensured the output of the workshops wasn’t the final part of the process. There were opportunities for everyone involved to see the user journeys and comment where they weren’t comfortable with what was there, or with what had been missed. This iterative process really strengthened the final result and ensured our lack of time didn’t impact significantly. But I’d definitely see how to build more time in next time round!
Laura: As mentioned by Janine, getting the right people in the room is key. When we are exploring processes you want to make sure that you have input for all key stakeholders as their likely to be significant change, and stakeholder buy-in at this point will assist engagement and future success.
The lessons we learned
Janine: Our experience has been that user journeys are useful far beyond their life in developing a new website. They really helped to distil what different people are trying to achieve when they engage with us. This will be helpful when considering other tools or services they engage with both on and offline.
The benefit of having users in the room for this session (in fact, every Discovery session!) can’t be overestimated. Being able to really understand their experience when we were talking about what they might need can’t really be put into words.
Another tip we learned was that the first draft doesn’t need to be the final product. This gives space for those who weren’t involved to input. It also allows for checking back in with users. Once the journey work had been complete we went back to our participation group, Carers’ Voice, to ask if it was right, or what might be missing. As ever, this added valuable insight which we could further build on. In our original timetable we hadn’t left enough space for this sort of engagement, but it was so valuable we amended the project end date to fit more of it in!
Finally, we learned that it’s not about mapping everything. It’s not about defining all the pages in your site map; it’s not about covering every single journey people make. It’s about choosing the main journey’s, as identified in the user profiles, to prioritise how and where information should be displayed on the site. Or at least, that’s our experience! If you‘d like more information, or would like to access the user journeys we created, get in touch!
