Journey Mapping

Mapping out the journey and breaking it down into stages is a great way of understanding the customer experience. This allows you to break down the different touchpoints, user behaviours, what works well and the pain points. How to run a virtual user journey mapping workshop | by Ana Boyer | UX Planet

Service Blueprint

Service blueprinting is a tool for understanding the relationship with customers and different touchpoints. It is a great way at identifying the different players in the organisation. This allows you to understand the system as a whole and bring together stakeholders to show the influences at which point. Service Blueprint Guide – With Examples | Miro

User Personas

User personas are user profiles that represent the users journey and help the team to empathise with users. Each persona may represent users within a particular subgroup. They detail the user goals, behaviours, problems, and needs of a particular group of users. Proto personas can be created at the start of a project. These will be based on the assumptions of stakeholders and project team and can then be refined or added to following user research activities when you have met with users and have a deeper understanding of contexts, behaviours, challenges and goals. Additional personas are likely to be added at this stage.

The design and content teams can use this information to build products that align with the needs of the users. Knowing your audience will influence the design and help with making decisions about the product.

Typically, a user persona might include:

• A persona name, image, demographic and other contextual information.
• Their needs, goals and behaviours in relation to the product
• Challenges, frustrations and pain points
• Accessibility needs
• Quotes from real users that relate to the persona group.

Example personas can be found in the research library.

Empathy Maps

Empathy maps are another useful tool to help colleagues have a general understanding of our users and their needs. They are quicker to create than personas, grouping users to give a quick overview of how a particular customer group feels about a product.

Typically, an empathy map will include what the user:

• Says and does: quotes and observations from research, what they do and how they do it?
• Thinks and feels: what matters to the user? What do they hesitate to vocalise?
• Hears: recommendations, word of mouth.
• Sees: what else do they see throughout the experience when engaging with the organisation such as reviews, social media, or press?

Some empathy maps might also include pains and gains. This is a useful articulation of hurdles a user might face when completing a task as well as their goals and what they hope to gain.