By nature, consulting firms work closely with their clients, which is a boon for designers when it comes to creating personas for user journey maps. For designers at B2B and B2C tech companies, interviews and surveys are crucial for gathering information on the user experience. Consultants make use of these tools, too, but they often also have the option of observing their end users at work and in the office — pre-Covid-19, anyway.
Despite the difference in access to end users, designers at tech companies can still learn a thing or two from their consulting counterparts about building user personas. For example, the tech industry leans heavily on automation to free up employees from spending too much time on repetitive and mundane tasks. However, Christopher Goodman, senior strategic solutions specialist at digital transformation consultancy Inspirant Group, recommends that before a company automate its processes, they first check to see if those processes are optimized.
To accomplish this, Goodman strategically steers the conversation in user interviews away from talk about existing system limits and capabilities.
“Many users are confined within the bounds of their current experience, so it’s important to ask questions in a way that doesn’t require them to reflect on how they do things today — but rather how they would be most productive,” Goodman said.
While the information gathering process may be different, Goodman has quite a bit of experience building user journey maps and valuable advice to share, particularly when it comes to the earliest steps of the process.
Briefly describe your product’s user journey. What is your typical user’s first touch point with your product?’
I like to visit the user where they work and experience their challenges in real time, if possible. Oftentimes, users are stuck on paper-based processes and exchanging documents via email. Because of this, they perceive their processes to be extremely difficult and time-consuming — but that’s mostly because of the medium. Once those processes are broken down into their most discrete steps, it becomes clear that they can be optimized and often partially, if not completely, automated.
As we develop custom solutions, our users see the product “materialize before their eyes” through initial mock-ups and then demos of a working application. Through agile development, we strive to get the user working with the product as soon as possible and experiencing how it helps them on their journey. This constant feedback loop ensures the application is being built to match the user’s needs.
There is little value in automating a process that has not been optimized.”
When building a user journey map, what are some best practices that your team always adheres to?
I typically start with just a conversation with a group of users because if the steps to arrive at a journey map and subsequent user stories are too regimented, users tend to focus on that process instead of providing useful information about what they do. I like to have someone helping me document the important points so I can keep the conversation flowing. It’s also very important to steer away from current system capabilities and limitations.
Many users are confined within the bounds of their current experience, so it’s important to ask questions in a way that doesn’t require them to reflect on how they do things today — but rather how they would be most productive. There is little value in digitizing/automating a process that has not been optimized. Failure to optimize rarely reduces the pain points enough to justify the effort in building a new system.
Describe how a fleshed-out user journey map has altered how you conceived of the design for one of your products in the past.
So many times users are surprised to see how hampered they are by their current processes and tools. When talking through a journey with one client pre Covid-19, I didn’t initially realize how much time they spent traveling to multiple locations to review paperwork. It turned out that in many cases, their meetings could be done virtually if the business process and associated materials were managed electronically. The time savings on travel alone was justification to build a new tool that would not only work within their current process but offered the opportunity to vastly optimize their processes at every step.
It even rendered certain tasks completely obsolete because the ability to audit reviews and transactions eliminated the need to fill out additional paperwork. This was a watershed moment for not only the user but the client as a whole. They saw that taking time to understand a user’s journey could result in a vastly improved process and product.
