UX Methods are essential for a variety of reasons. However, before I get into what UX Methods are and why they are good, I must first touch upon what UX is. UX stands for user experience. This is a design process that companies use when creating products that will be helpful to users. UX is important because not only does it assist in keeping users loyal to the product, but it also leads to your company’s success, especially if you are catering to the needs of your users.
Among the most popular UX methods are Card Sorting, Cognitive Walkthrough, Competitive Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, I Like – I Wish – What If, Informal Usability testing, Interviewing Users, and Surveys. I am going to focus on a different UX method. The method that I will be focusing on is a Journey Map. I genuinely believe that Journey Maps will be useful in helping to evaluate the TaylorMade Website and its audience. Journey Maps are crucial when following the journey between the user’s interaction with a product. Journey Maps are theoretically a visual timeline of a customer’s experience as they navigate a website.
Essentially, Journey Mapping is a timeline of the user’s actions. The goal is to discover all the steps the user went through to achieve the given goal, what obstacles they overcame, and, most importantly, what was their emotional reaction at each step. Although Journey Maps can be presented in various ways, the components within them are similar. The setup, experience, and insights are the components typically included. The setup includes the scenario, the type of user, and what goals the user hopes to achieve. The experience includes the stages that a user may go through during each step of the process. Insights generally include what was discovered during each stage. Using a persona for a journey map can make things easier. It will make things more effective by allowing us to look at the product from a perspective other than our own. If you choose this route, it is crucial to consider what your persona thinks is most important, along with their frustrations and needs.
There have been research studies that have used Journey Mapping to get their results. The first study I will discuss is a study by Stephanie Ly, Fiona Runacres, and Peter Poon called Journey mapping as a novel approach to healthcare: a qualitative mixed methods study in palliative care. This study aimed to determine if journey mapping in medical research and the clinical setting could help. The model used to evaluate the paradigm was specialist palliative care services because there are numerous evidence gaps and inconsistencies in the delivery of care that is addressed when using this tool. The method consisted of a sample of a few members of a supportive and palliative care unit of a major Australian Tertiary health service evaluating journey maps illustrating the final year of life of inpatient palliative care patients. The results show that “Journey Maps provides a holistic patient-centered perspective of care that characterized healthcare interactions within a longitudinal trajectory.” As a result of the journey maps, the participants identified blockades to effective palliative care and opportunities to improve care.
Journey Mapping also provides many benefits. The most crucial benefit, in my opinion, is that it puts you in your customer’s shoes. Because of this, it allows you to see what makes your user choose or not choose to use your product. Another benefit is that a journey map allows you to visualize emotions instead of only actions, which is important because turning feelings into concrete data often presents a challenge. A third benefit is that it creates personalized experiences that customers love since they value brands that understand their wants and needs. Although, at first, it may seem like journey maps are hard to create and are a waste of time, when you consider their benefits, you will realize that they yield great results for your product.
Please See my Journey map below that represents a users experience with using TaylorMade’s website.
