Illustrating the Big Picture. Experience designers use a wide variety of techniques to represent the interactions between individuals, organizations, and systems. Personas are the go-to tool to aggregate a target audience’s traits, intentions, needs, and behaviors; however, they often leave out one of the most critical elements of interaction design: time. As rich as these snapshots may be, people’s needs and even their traits may change over time, and personas start to burst at the seams when it comes to illustrating a full story of engagement.
To show personas moving through time, we traditionally use task flows, scenarios, and storyboards. Often these models focus on limited experiences or specific interactions between user and system during a fairly short period of time. Naturally, UX professionals are adapting traditional techniques and creating new ones to express this greater scope of experience. Many of these activities and deliverables fall into a category we call journey modeling. What is Journey Modeling? Journeys. Customer journey mapping game (transport) by christophe Tallec on Prezi. New Ways of Visualizing the Customer Journey Map. [Credit: Evan Litvak ] Evan chose to represent his journey as a circular graphic instead of the more common linear or chart structure. As the field of service design evolves so do the tools. At Adaptive Path we often find ourselves debating the form and definition of service design artifacts. I was curious to see how a new crop of interaction designers might interpret the journey map.
Luckily I had access to an army of fresh thinkers when I co-taught an undergrad Visual Interaction Design class at the California College of the Arts this past year. One thing that struck me about the CCA undergrads was their natural ability to think cross-functionally. It was clear that they have grown up immersed in technology-driven ecosystems.
I took the students on a good old fashioned field trip to Adaptive Path and recruited six colleagues to help me guide them through a journey mapping activity. In small groups the students were tasked with documenting the experience of using public transportation. Customer Journey Map. Engine Service Design | Service Design.