Now that you've planned and prepared for happy paths and edge cases, let's discover what user journeys are all about. A user journey is the series of experiences a user has as they achieve a specific goal. User journeys built off the personas and stories you've already created. They help you think and feel like the user, which is super important. If you can't put yourself in the user's shoes, you can't be sure your design will really help them. Before you start the user journey, you need a journey map. A journey map is just what it sounds like, an illustration of what the user goes through to achieve their goals. Think of it like reading a book. If the persona is your character, the user story is your plot, and the journey map is your story outline. First, let's do a little experiment. Imagine we want to drive to the beach for a swim. We can pull up a map on our phone to get an overview of the best route. We know our starting point and our endpoint, so let's go for a drive. So far so good. Oops, looks like a traffic jam up ahead. Luckily, the map app gives us a detour route to avoid the traffic. Map apps help drivers avoid obstacles along their route. The same idea applies to journey maps. A user journey map helps UX designers create obstacle-free paths for users. That's the first benefit to user journey mapping. Now let's go over some more. A user journey map reduces the impact of designer bias, which you might remember as the tendency for the designer to design according to their own needs and wants instead of the users. Creating a user journey map lets you thoroughly document the entire sequence of events and interactions a user experiences, including the user's interaction with your design. That way you can really focus on how a specific persona, not you, thinks and feels at every step of the journey. User journey mapping also highlights new pain points. For example, say your persona Kindred is biracial. Her user journey is filling out her census info online. Everything is going well until it's time for Kindred to select her race from the drop-down menu. Suddenly she hits a roadblock. There's no option for her to identify herself as both Black and Asian. That's a big pain point. If you, yourself aren't biracial, you might not have predicted this problem, but by creating the persona of Kindred, giving her a story, and mapping out her journey using a user journey map, you're able to clearly identify the issue she's experiencing and improve the design. This brings us to the final key benefit of journey mapping. Identify improvement opportunities. In Kindred's example, you could add an option in the menu for users to write in their own racial identity, or maybe you could add another field to the drop-down menu for multi-racial citizens. Improving the UX here can make a big difference. How do we map out a user journey? One action at a time. Let's say our persona, Jamal, comes from a town of 500 people in rural Mississippi. He uses a wheelchair to get around and he's visiting New York City for the first time. Today, he wants to fulfill his dream of going all the way to the top of the Empire State Building. How do we map out his journey? To start, identify the first task the user needs to complete. In this case, Jamal needs to find a subway route that will take him to the Empire State Building. Next, list all the things the user needs to do to reach their goal. Here's a list of Jamal's main tasks. Task 1, determine the subway line and route to take. Task 2, find the nearest station with wheelchair accessibility. Task 3, buy a ticket. Task 4, find the right platform and make sure the train is headed toward the Empire State Building and not away from it. Task 5, board the subway. Task 6, find the right exit. The next action in mapping a user journey is describing all the smaller things the user must accomplish before graduating to the next main task. Here's what that might look like for Jamal. That's it. You got Jamal all the way to the Empire State Building. Your work here is done. Well, not exactly. You've completed Jamal's physical journey, but you still need to consider his emotional journey too. The third action in mapping a user journey is identifying the user's likely emotions as they go from task to task. For example, imagine how Jamal might feel the first time he looks at the subway line map, he might be confused and intimidated. Or imagine that Jamal has purchased his ticket and is trying to get to the right platform. He can't use the stairs, so he'll need to find an elevator or ramp. The elevator might not be working, so he has to find a ramp. This experience could make Jamal feel overwhelmed and make him feel excluded. There's one final action in our journey mapping exercise. Once we've identified the user's emotions, we can then identify opportunities to improve his user experience. This is where user journey mapping can really enhance UX design. Without mapping the actions of Jamal's journey, it might never have occurred to us to add an accessibility key to the map to help users with wheelchairs navigate the subway stations more easily. Here's what a completed user journey map looks like for Jamal. Now you know how user journey is built off of user stories and personas. You also know the benefits of user journey maps, and you understand how to create a journey map. Jamal's user journey may have come to an end, but we've still got a long way to go in our UX design journey. Coming up, we'll highlight the importance of considering accessibility.
