Week 50 @ KSU's UXD Program - User Journeys
Being a UX team of one at my job and in the entire company for that matter, creating user journeys was something I never had time to get to on my previous projects. It's a lot of work, and it's complex, and it's intimidating, and it's detailed, and as I found out this week... it's hard, really hard.
By coincidence this week, I started listening to Podcasts related to UX for my commute to work and came across an episode between Jared Spool and Kim Goodwin about mapping the user journey. Long story short, I learned 3 big things from the episode:
- If your user journeys are bad, it means your user interviews or field studies were likely terrible
- Journey maps help you more than just basic personas
- Journey maps are incredibly important to understanding your own product and the details behind it
I now know how important journey maps are, but I also know how time consuming and difficult they are to produce. If I had unlimited resources, I would make sure these are produced for every project I am ever involved in because of well they combine the empathy for the user (I now believe better than a persona) and how well they describe the functionality of your product. And if I had a magic wand to make myself an incredible UX professional, I would first give myself the gift of journey mapping.
Overall, I loved this work, but I feel like this could have been a 7-week course just by itself. I know it's a weakness of mine to glaze over the details, which is why I would love to be an expert in creating highly valuable (detailed) journey maps.