How is your customer journey mapping going? Have you had a chance to look around for good examples of journey maps? You might have noticed this already, but I purposely left out certain details so that you can look them up yourself. There is plenty of good information on UX design out there. It is not always easy to find, and you might have to sort through some less than idea presentation, but it is there. Feel free to shoot me an email if you’d like me to look over something you find and want to make sure it is legit.
Today I’d like to present to you another way of capturing insights about the users that would take you closer to solving the problem at hand. It is called User Story Mapping. It is actually fairly similar to a customer journey map, but the focus is a bit different. It might sound like overkill for what you are trying to do for your portfolio, but trust me it is a great tool that will win you bonus points in your case study. It will help uncover insights about the users, but also capture the findings from your research, and plan out the design (and development). It will also teach you a bit about the iterative software development process, which might be eye opening if you had no prior experience working in the software company.
An excellent reference for User Story Mapping is an article by Jeff Patton: The New User Story Backlog is a Map. Jeff Patton is the author of the method. Interestingly enough, he is not a UX designer. I guess he is more of a product manager (PM), a role that is responsible for figuring out what to build. In most cases there is a lot of overlap (and power struggle) between what PMs and UX designers do, but that is a topic for another time. The reason I am telling you this here is that you might find that his writing is a bit different because it is written primarily not to designers but product managers, also so that you don’t feel bad if some details he is talking about don’t make much sense. Free free to skip over the development minutiae if it doesn’t make much sense.
This article will be a great primer to User Story Mapping. If you are interested in learning more, Jeff published a book User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product.
In the article Jeff references Indi Young’s Mental Models and Todd Warfel’s Task Analysis Grid. I encourage you to look into those frameworks as well. A simple Google search should lead you in the right direction.
Take what you learn from these and see how you can apply it to the problem that you are trying to solve for your case study.
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