I just finished my first quarter of grad school at University of Washington! I am working on my master’s in Human Centered Design and Engineering.
The final deliverable for my HCDE 518 user-centered design class was a journey map of my experience in the course.
I’ve created a journey map before based on vague instructions, but I had never created one for a product or specific experience.
A journey map should speak for itself, but being my first real attempt, I wanted to take a moment to explain my thoughts — and maybe get yours as well — about my approach to this assignment.
A journey map, as I understand it, is a timeline expressing a user/persona’s actions and emotions as they experience a product or event. The map should include action-based “touch points” and highlight the user’s feelings.
Journey Map (it’s big, sorry!)
Persona
The persona is myself: a multi-tasking busybody trying to balance both a full time job and part time school. The time-balancing aspect was the largest trend that stretched across this quarter of school, always on the top of my mind, so I designed my map around this concept.
Relevant to my experience with the course, I listed my motivations, challenges, and some of my skills (stats) as well. I’m very resourceful, but sometimes I struggle with communication.
Blue Timeline
The large blue graph is a prettified copy of my work and school schedule. My school team completed ample bookkeeping to ensure our calendars lined up, so we always have a record of our meeting times. My Microsoft work calendar is similar. Any extra readings and assignments were also blocked in as part of school work. Assignments were always due midnight on Tuesday, which are also expressed at the top of the graph.
While my time schedule essentially dictated all of my touch points and emotions, it is in the background because it’s simply that — something that always persisted in the background that I had to manage.
Each chunk of blue is a week and is broken further into 7 chunks to show my schedule on each day, read vertically, from down to up. I decided to portray the weeks in increasingly heavy shades of blue for a number of reasons: amount of information I’ve learned over the course, amount of the course completed… but my personal favorite, special to my experience at UW, is the amount of sunlight when I commuted to class. I catch the bus at 4:30 each week, and by the final couple of weeks, the sun was already setting around 4! I even wore a headlamp one day.
Weekly Quotes
Each week of this quarter I was tasked to complete a mini status report of my time in class and any challenges or expectations I was facing. The quotes along the bottom of the graph are real quotes from my status reports — perfect for capturing the emotion in snippet of time! Remember that my resourcefulness is my strength.
Touch Points & Emotions
These status reports also helped me graph my affect and some of the touch points on the graph, as indicated as dots on the thick black line. Points at the top are more positive while lower points are more negative — however, often times I was feeling equally tired and equally excited about deliverables, so take those emotions with a grain of salt. I also labelled my key as “affect” rather than “emotion” — it’s easy to be happy or sad, but where does tired or passionate fall on that scale? So I went for the more open-ended of the terms.
Contrasting to other journey maps I’ve seen, I opted to skip the neutral/base line of emotions, since it’s challenging to reflect on your emotions without relating them to each other. So the line goes up and down as I get excited or burnt out, but I decided against creating a neutral threshold. You cannot have a high without having a low, so a neutral line might be moot in this regard as well.
Some Lessons
I am a huge fan of color, so I was determined to incorporate color in a meaningful and beautiful way in this map. However, opting for a chunky gradient of blue made the rest of my visual design much more challenging than expected.
Every other layer on top of the blue had to be both visually appealing and readable — something which I didn’t achieve to the fullest, both in terms of color-blocking for my calendar and for text overlay. If I had more time, I would have fiddled with some other color options.
I started with the concept of balancing my schedule as the main focus of this map. While the timeline is key to a journey map, the touch points and emotions are what define it. I wish I had fleshed out my touch points and emotion responses prior to starting my design. As a result, I feel there is some confusion about which information is more important: the weekly quotes or the touch points? (My desired answer was that they can be used equally in conjunction. But I am not sure that desire is clear.)
In Conclusion
The open-ended-ness of journey maps make them challenging to design — the formula is vague. But like any document, as long as it gets the point across, it should be sufficient. (How sufficient is a different question.)
Is mine sufficient? I hope so! For a first try, I’m pretty proud of it, but I’ll definitely be taking my learnings with me to the next one.
Thanks for reading! Comments? Let me know your thoughts!
