On a Journey to make a great Project and Product? Check for success here first to find out how to make an easy and fast User Journey. The user experience can be challenging and also complex. But here, I want to keep things simple.

On a Journey to make a great Project and Product? Check for success here first to find out how to make an easy and fast User Journey.

What is a User Journey?

There are many references to this term and the underlying approach and goals. However, I want to share how I use it. And how you can use this approach to simply and effectively impact your projects, stories, services, and products.

How to Make a Simple User Journey?

• User or Persona defined for all wants, needs, and goals

• Role Play Experience to assess the journey for 1 role

• Interactive Engagement map to connect the related Persona’s input and outcomes

• A Story to test the end to end Experience across multiple users

First, let me clarify some terms you may know or have heard:

Persona — the person, imagined who will be experiencing the tasks to complete a goal.

User Journey — the Journey related to any role or individual's goal-based Experience. 

Customer Journey — the Journey related to a product or service goal of an end-user.

User Journey map — documented the person's motivation, task steps, and feelings when on the Journey. This can also include the ''mechanics'' needed, including the process, tools, technology required to make the Journey possible. 

Interactive Engagement map — a diagram showing the relationship between multiple journeys to create an ecosystem overview. This is the most forgotten step but an essential step in putting together a Journey. 

Day in the Life Story — Testing the Persona's ideas and the Experience and putting this one task into a broader context. To reach your goal of understanding your User, 

Simply put, User Journey's are meant to show how people do or could experience an event, space, product, service, or work. Sometimes they are detailed, other times aspirational. 

Why do User Journey's work?  

Creating good experiences make for happier Customers, employees, or users. Learning to empathize with your User helps you make better choices during your project or design phases.

So if that is the objective of a User Journey — why doesn't everyone do them? Because it can be challenging. Why? 

You may think you have a clear vision, but the vision gets foggy in the design or documentation.

• You may think you understand your User, but you find when writing it down, you aren't sure that person exists.

• You may find after drafting the user experience scenario, users assess the situation as unlikely or not realistic.  
  
  

Taking the time to work through a User Journey is a way to visualize your idea in detail. It helps you succeed in your goal because it allows the User to succeed in their goal - a positive, useful, and successful completion of a task or objective. 

• Have you visited an amusement park, like Disneyland, and do you remember standing in long lines? Then you have been the User in that Experience. Was it clear where the line started, how it advanced people toward the ride? Was there also something engaging and enjoyable watch along waiting route?

• The goal was to get to the ride, but the Experience started much earlier, didn't it? Also, there may have been interacting with others: did someone take your ticket or usher you along the path? If so, how did their Journey impact yours?

This is what a good User Journey does. Make clear the path, the goal, the engagement, and the impressions and feelings afterward. And in the end, I like to use storyboards or actual stories to help bring the Experience to life to share it with others. As a project manager, a story can clarify and inspire your team, stakeholders, or use to validate the goal with the User your project is meant to serve.

1. User or Persona: 

Persona is maybe someone you know or don't know, but they are not imaginary. Your User should represent a realistic identity: not too broad, someone you would ''recognize''.  

If your Persona is for a customer journey, use the person represented by one type of your Customer: using demographic information you have available. Better yet, ask someone who is in the group you are trying to represent to help you.

If your Persona is for a user journey, say a family project or a team project. Identify a specific role. 

Describing everyone means you are describing no one person. 

Detail your Persona, focusing on the basics and whatever is especially relevant to the task or goal you are focused on.

Note their potential issues or pain points in my ''Disney ride line'' example. A pain point may be the Persona cannot determine how long their line wait time will be.

Note their potential goals unrelated to the direct task or goal. Again, in the ''Disney'' example, how will people connect with those waiting after the ride is completed.

2. Role Play an Experience:

Once you have a sense of this person, next draft a simple journey based on your Persona and the task or goal, you do not have to be an actor to do this. You only need to imagine and document the steps to tasks and how your Persona reacts to them.  

A good way to brainstorm this is to run through a Role Play. Act as your Persona would do tasks that are known or new to come up with the Journey. As you go through this Role Play, think about your Persona, the Experience, the Story. Make a storyboard as you go (with sticky notes online or on paper).  

Using this method, you can test many kinds of ideas:

• How will the new kitchen be used?

• How will the children's party times and actives be managed?

• How will the project manager define the Customer's user persona to build empathy in the project team?

Mentally or physically, move around the space if it is physical. Draw up your space on paper or line if it is digital. ''Inhabit the person and the task''. Ask questions to challenge your ideas.  

3. Interactive Engagement Map:

This is something I have been doing in addition to the person for some years. Since we interact as people in many of the tasks we perform, you can now see how these Personas and Experiences connect. 

Once you believe you have drawn up a realistic Persona, and have an Experience you have Role Played, put it aside and move on to another Persona if needed. You may have 2 or 3, and each of these may have different experiences.  

Examples of these interconnections may be:

How someone visits a website and opens an online chat with a person or bot.

How someone in managing line social distancing interacts with those in line.

How the Project process designer interacts with the product designer ensures the end result meets the Customer Journey goals.

Use the Role Play Experiences and Personas, and as you align them, think about Who, What, and When these roles interact. If I want the Customer's Experience to be helpful and positive, I need to ensure that the employee and their tools are helpful and positive for the employee.  

Have you ever had customer service from someone who is overwhelmed or whose systems are not working? I think we all have, and the Experience was often not helpful or positive. So the interconnections are important to understand what I will call the "ecosystem of experiences".

To test when and how each of the various Persona'sPersona's and Experiences intersect, create an Interactive Role timeline.  

What are the natural decision points and behaviors of the Persona?

Is the product, process, or service we will provide meeting the natural behaviors of the Persona?

What changes to the tools and processes are required to better serve the Persona's needs? 

4. Day in the Life Stories to test your User Experience 

Every User Experience needs to be tested. This can be in the sharing with a person who fits the Persona you have crafted. Or it can be working through the Experience with your team.  

No matter the topic or Persona, every situation can have a Journey. A simple version can be task-oriented. But the good journeys focus on the helpful, successful Journey of one Persona. Driven by their goals (not yours) and driven by the tasks they are most likely to complete. 

Creating a story, in whatever form, can help you examine your User Journey, validate the accuracy of your Persona and ensure your vision for the goal of your project (be it ordering a kitchen or building an app) is clear and can be successful.  

Have you created user experiences before? If so, what did it help you learn? If not, do you think you will try it in the future? Do you have any questions for me? If so, please leave them in the comments below, and I will answer them.