User journey map example

User journeys can reveal opportunities

Mapping complex experiences

I’ve recently learned how user journey maps can help understand user flows and problems as a designer. But I think the bigger benefit is using those maps to have a conversation with others involved in the project to bring everyone to the same understanding. NN/G has a great course on user journey mapping and another on service blueprinting that really helped me to think differently about the process and apply those learnings to my job.

A UX designer can often be seen as a “page” delivery expert. But our work is much more valuable when we’re thinking about “experience” delivery.

I’m using user journey mapping in several of my projects to understand complex sequencing, find opportunities for improving the flow, creating a backlog of needed user research studies, and evolving the systems and processes that make these flows happen.

User journey sketches

One of the problems I’ve found is that user journey map examples tend to look very polished. But their intention is to deliver a message, understand a scenario. I wanted to break out of the idea that user journeys have to be polished or even done by designers. I built a toolkit in Miro in order for anyone to be able to dive in and create a user journey with the right team.

User journey map template in Miro

I often see conflation between user journeys (meant to understand a specific user’s flow throughout a process to accomplish a task) versus a user flow (meant to show an opinionated flow of how a user may go through a specific process).

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Who I am

I’m Dan, a Red Hatter I built this portfolio site to make sure I was spending enough time on me. When you’re a design leader, it’s often hard to invest time in yourself. My free time often goes to scheduling that 1:1 that I haven’t had a chance to do yet, or spending 15 minutes […]

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Design talks

Cross-team sharing I helped to start a concept of sharing across our large (at the time) 30 person or so design & development team (it’s now grown to close to 60). As our team evolved, it was becoming more and more difficult to stay connected. What we found useful in smaller sessions were leaders of […]

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Trying a product

Open source enterprise software When marketing enterprise software, we have requirements to allow users to test the products out. Selling open source enterprise software makes the process of giving the user what they need even more challenging. The goal of the business is to connect with the user, finding ways to make sure they’re enabled […]

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