11 Customer Journey Mapping

The Nielsen Norman Group has a comprehensive website that provides how-to information on the most popular types of user experience activities such as customer journey mapping (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/). In addition, they provide an overview article of when to utilize what type of methodology such as directly engaging with users vs observing, collecting self-reported data https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/.

One popular method is that of customer journey mapping which as we noted before is the external-facing version of the service blueprint https://blog.practicalservicedesign.com/the-difference-between-a-journey-map-and-a-service-blueprint-31a6e24c4a6c. Journey maps allow users to tell you what they are experiencing and feeling during each step of a particular service or activity. Customer journey maps are a great way to put yourself in your users’ shoes so that you are seeing their challenges and successes with fresh eyes which will help you make improvements or test out a new offering. Here too, creating a flowchart of each stop along the journey will help you analyze the action with the corresponding experience. Customer journey maps typically involve the following steps https://www.ngdata.com/how-to-create-a-customer-journey-map/:

• Understanding your “typical” user persona so that you can extrapolate from a few to the overall population
• Timeline (is it a one-time event or does it occur across a longer time span?)
• Touchpoints are all of the things and people where the user is interacting with a particular element or in this case, their data processes
• Asking open ended questions will help users fill in their own thoughts and feedback

This is the first step in the design thinking process where you are trying to understand your stakeholder’s perspective. This is a much more direct method of collecting the actual experiences of researchers rather than hearing about them and it allows us to be able to structure future questions more meaningfully as opposed to asking something like what their challenges are. You will see that the design thinking document contains very specific questions which we were able to derive from the templates and which we might not have uncovered had we simply started with a focus-group like scenario first.

Broad questions to consider to assist with this section:

• How long does your data need to be preserved?
• What kind of descriptors are necessary for later retrieval of the data?
• How will you provide context for the stored data?
• Who will need to be able to access the data?
• How will you make the data accessible?
• Will your data be embargoed?