user experience map – My musings

03 know your target user

who they really are

user journey map

I believe one of the corner stones of building a good product is to keep the customer in focus. Trust me it is easier said than done. It takes time, empathy and to some extent skill to understand the daily life of our user. What is the intrinsic goal they are trying to achieve ? How they are doing it now ? How can we help them do it better?

This starts from talking with the user, spending time with them at their place and ecosystem and be with them. That is where the journey starts.

01 how do we know our user

The goal here is to understand the existing behaviour of our users. Please don’t think of solutions now. Keep the technology away. We must endeavour to answer some of the following questions:

what is the goal they are trying to achieve – a goal could be a user trying to get to work from home, finding specific groceries from various countries, finding the appropriate school for their child in a new suburb.
what is a typical day for them – sometimes knowing their typical day, knowing about their personal situations, family etc
why they do the way they do – why they currently do the way they do things to achieve their goals. As an accountant, for e.g, why they upload the excel and not do something else. There may be social, financial, organisational and other aspects associated with why they ware doing things in a certain way.
what problems they face – now, this is the gold we are after. What are the problems they face when they do things the current way, what do they think would be better for them.
what do they value – I have found it is important to also understand what are the value. For someone trust might be important while for someone cost and someone else ease of use.
what alternatives they have – so what alternative products or manual alternatives they have at the moment to achieve their goal. This could give us insights into our competitive products, in which case we can still poke them for their opinions on those products but their could also be manual things they do to work around their problems.

02 how do we know our users

I have learnt that though time consuming and may needs special skill but talking to and interviewing our customers gives us critical and authentic information. Product researchers are probably trained and skilled to do this better, but I still would advocate that all team members must be able to do this if we wanted to.

Important note:

if possible do this exercise at their work place.
From the interviews and observations, please remember to take notes as direct quotes of what they say. It is important that everyone in the team collectively gets to see what rest of the teams have gathered.
Collect relevant product reviews/feedbacks, market research, available data, surveys etc
We can then bring out important aspects like – pain and what they love from those quotes

These interviews can then be supplemented by other researches and data. But remember, only data doesn’t give us a good perspective neither research done by someone else. Though they may help.

03 user journey map

Once we have gathered data through as many modes as we could, we would like to create a customer journey map to understand how the customer currently interacts with your existing product/service or how the customer goes about reaching his/her goals (in the event this is for a new product)

Please note that there are various forms/templates used for customer journey map and this is not a tutorial how to develop it. I am intending to provide a simplified version of such a map to demonstrate what we are trying to achieve.