User Journeys
User journeys reveal opportunities for improvement, showing us where people might stumble or get frustrated. They help teams align on a shared vision, ensuring everyone is working toward the same goal of making users’ lives easier and more enjoyable.
Start with the Domain and User Persona
Creating a user journey is like planning a road trip. And for this we need two things: the domain and the user persona.
The domain is the map, showing the possible routes — the twists, turns, and potential pitfalls of your product. The user persona is the travel companion. It’s the voice in the passenger seat, telling you their hopes, fears, and preferences for the journey.
Together, they’re a powerful duo. The domain ensures you understand the landscape, while the persona helps you see it through someone else’s eyes. It’s the difference between mechanically following a GPS and truly empathizing with your fellow traveler.
You need both to create a journey. You’re not just building a path; you’re crafting an experience that resonates with real people in real situations.
So, let’s start to build our user journey for a customer relationship management system.
Prompt
Create a user journey map for a business development representative using a customer relationship management system. List in a table with tasks, touchpoints, actions, and feelings.
Add the Task
We have set the stage with the product and the user persona using the product. But often, a user can complete multiple actions within a product. To ensure we yield specific information about our user’s experience on their journey, we want to be specific with what the user is coming to our product to accomplish.
To do this, we’ll add the task to the prompt and in this example, it’s managing accounts.
Prompt
Create a user journey map for a business development representative using a customer relationship management system to manage accounts.
Add the Feature and Format
Picture your road trip again, but this time with a high-powered telescope narrowing the focus of the trip. That’s what adding more focus to the domain and user persona does for your user journey.
You can zoom in on the nitty-gritty details of your route — the hidden shortcuts, the scenic viewpoints, the potential traffic jams or wrong exits. Meanwhile, that deep conversation helps you truly understand your companion’s quirks, touchpoints, actions, and feelings.
With this clarity, you’re not just following a map; you’re crafting the adventure. You’ll know exactly when to take that scenic detour your friend will love or how to navigate a tricky interchange without stress.
Now, let’s apply this to our user journey map. To better understand our user’s preferences and experience, we want to zoom in on the touchpoints and smaller tasks they will complete to reach their goal of managing accounts. We want to know what actions they take and how they feel while taking them.
We’ll include these features in our prompt and we’ll also specify the format we prefer this list to appear: a table.
Prompt
Create a user journey for a business development representative using a customer relationship management system with touchpoints, actions, and feelings. Use a table format.
Prompt
Create a user journey map for a business development representative using a customer relationship management system to manage accounts. List in a table with tasks, touchpoints, actions, and feelings.
Add a Timeline
Now imagine you’re on a tight schedule. Suddenly, time becomes crucial. Adding a time dimension to your user journey is like factoring in how long you can spend at each stop. It forces you to prioritize. Time adds urgency and context to your journey. It helps you understand if your travel companion (persona) is a leisurely sightseer or a destination-focused speedster. It reveals whether your route (domain) is a quick jaunt or a marathon trek.
By considering time, you ensure your journey is realistic and tests whether it is achievable. You’re crafting an experience that fits into people’s real lives, with all their time pressures and constraints.
Let’s give it a spin and include a timeline of a week.
Prompt
Create a user journey map for a business development representative using a customer relationship management system to manage accounts over a week long period. List in a table with touchpoints, actions, and feelings.
Ask for Suggestions
To refine it more, I asked the AI Assistant to suggest improvements to the prompt, and it delivered a great one — incorporating tasks.
Doing this can pinpoint specific interactions that users may engage in. This can lead to more understanding of the experience, as it highlights exactly where users may encounter difficulties or inefficiencies.
However, there are cons. Focusing too heavily on tasks can lead to a fragmented view of the user journey, where the overall experience is lost in the minutiae of individual actions. This can make it challenging to see the bigger picture and understand how tasks interconnect to form a seamless user experience.
Detailing every task can also be time-consuming, overwhelming others with too much information, leading to potential confusion or frustration if not managed properly.
Balancing the depth of the journey is something to watch for in the journey.
Let’s modify our previous prompt to replace the general task of “managing accounts” with more specific tasks like: logging interactions, setting reminders, and others.
Prompt
Create a user journey for a business development representative managing accounts using a customer relationship management system. The journey should include touchpoints, actions, and feelings at each stage. Use the following table format and include specific tasks such as logging interactions, setting reminders, updating account information, and tracking sales progress.