Journey mapping and storyboarding are powerful tools for experience design, but they can also help you align your team and stakeholders around a common vision. In this article, you will learn how to use these methods to create a shared understanding of your users, their needs, and your solutions.
Journey mapping and storyboarding are visual techniques that capture the user's perspective and experience in relation to a product, service, or process. A journey map is a diagram that shows the user's actions, emotions, pain points, and opportunities along a specific scenario or goal. A storyboard is a sequence of sketches or images that illustrate the user's story, context, and interactions with the product or service.
Journey mapping and storyboarding can be used to represent two states of an experience: the current experience or a proposed future state that does not exist yet. It is important for a group who is using these techniques to know which state they are describing and why.
Journey mapping and storyboarding can help you align your team and stakeholders around a common vision by providing a clear and empathetic representation of the user's needs, expectations, and emotions. It can also help to highlight the gaps, challenges, and opportunities in the current or desired state of the user experience, as well as communicate the value proposition and benefits of your proposed solutions or improvements. Moreover, it can create a shared language and reference point for feedback, collaboration, and decision making.
In our experience, a real strength of personas, journey mapping, and storyboarding is that it allows internal and external users an opportunity to discuss challenges without getting too personal. Through the process, the group can learn about issues around that experience and begin to understand their part in how that experience could be improved. This can often be enough in itself to provide impetus to change within the organisation.
In my experience these techniques work best when we are careful to separate documentation of the current experience as it is now and for a particular user with a particular goal from how the experience could or should work for the end user. Additionally it is important that we ground journey mapping and storyboarding in real, human data and the experiences of many (6–10) end-users. This ensures teams are aligning on real and broadly applicable user needs, expectations, and emotions.
To create a journey map, you need to define the scope and purpose of your journey map, such as the user's goal, problem, or scenario you want to explore, their primary and secondary personas, and the stages or phases of the journey. Additionally, data from user research, analytics, feedback, and other sources should be gathered and synthesized to understand the user's actions, thoughts, feelings, pain points, and opportunities at each stage. Visualize and document your journey map using a tool or template to create a visual representation of the journey map. Make it clear and engaging with colors, icons, labels, annotations, actions, emotions, pain points, opportunities, touchpoints, channels and other relevant elements.
Creating a storyboard requires you to define the scope and purpose of your storyboard, sketch or select images that represent it, and arrange and refine it. When defining the scope, consider the user's story, context, and goal that you want to illustrate. Additionally, consider how your product or service helps them achieve it and what key moments or interactions you want to highlight. Select images that show the user's situation, actions, emotions, and outcomes. Use arrows, captions, speech bubbles, and other elements to add details and clarity. Lastly, use a tool or a template to organize your images in a logical and sequential order. Make sure it flows smoothly and tells a compelling story. Edit or adjust your images and text as needed.
To use journey mapping and storyboarding for alignment, it's important to involve your team and stakeholders in the creation process. Invite them to participate in user research, data analysis, ideation, and feedback sessions. Additionally, present and discuss your journey map and storyboard with your team and stakeholders to use them as a basis for communication, collaboration, and decision making. Explain the rationale and benefits of your journey map and storyboard and address any questions, concerns, or objections. As you progress, iterate and update your journey map and storyboard as living documents that reflect user research, testing, validation, and implementation. Make sure to keep them visible and accessible to your team and stakeholders.
A journey map lets designers center the work of other disciplines around the user journey being being released. It provides a great high-level picture of what is being delivered, and an easy way to layer the work from multiple disciplines into one view. You also can use the journey map to audit existing resources, identify new resources which need to be created, and track progress of which items are complete, making it a great start to a release backlog
If you are concerned that a journey map or storyboard contains risky assumptions or bias that might lead to poor decisions, consider sharing with users to validate or invalidate what you've created.
Sometimes teams struggle to figure out the "right" scope for a journey map. What I've seen work is for the team or individual to know what decision or set of decisions they're hoping to make. This helps them to determine the start and end points of a journey, as well as document it a the appropriate level of detail.