Thinking about user journeys in testing isn’t a particularly new topic (although probably truly conducted a lot less than we would like to admit). I suspect even rather than that is the user journey in design and planning. At least once engineering teams are involved. This is something that I’ve had little chance to explore in practice but it really interests me.
I’ve explored a few techniques in my own time from feature mapping to story mapping. I like the structure of story mapping (and how it ties to example mapping), letting us consider the workflow, MVP and priorities.
Once the PO from our group took a really interesting approach that I quite liked.
We started off by discussing the parts of our larger feature up for consideration. We talked through personas. We drafted a few workflows. Then we prioritised what we thought was most important and tapped into those workflows some more. What was the most important one?
This gave the team more enthusiasm and ownership of what we were working on. However 6 months on and real grumblings and discontent came in. We’d abandoned trying to identify user journeys. This was because the business had already decided the workflows and priorities around 2 years ago. We were lagging well behind the design on the system. We picked up a solution to implement. Then tried to inject the “user” into our stories a little more artificially.
What made this frustrating is how awesome the UX guy was at being open to collaborate. But that lag between a workflow being agreed, mock-ups demoed to customers and then later, us getting involved, really broke our engagement with trying to solve customer issues. Yes, I pushed using personas and we included user benefits in our demos but it was “tacked on”.
My taking from this experience was that when the development teams got involved in considering the user early it made a real difference. Who is this for? What are they trying to achieve? However this only works if you get development, test, UX/design and product in the room together.
Get these key stakeholders involved in mapping out the problem and desired solution.