Now I have looked into my competitors and my users in some detail I need to consider how people will use my design. This is where I am going to look at journey mapping, I am going to look at how users are going to use my app and how that journey will work for them. Understanding how my users get to my app and how they are likely to use it will help me make design decisions such as what onboarding I need and how should I order my user flow. All very important design decisions if I want my design to be effective.
Again I decided to use Miro to complete my journey map and they have a number of templates to help with this task. Looking through these templates however, it was clear they were multi-purpose templates and that none were ideal for my purpose. However I found this one created by Columbia Road, which I still feel will be useful and which I can modify where required to better meet my requirements.
It also has a clear legend to explain how to fill it out and an example version to refer to, so I can get the most from this exercise.
Using the example provided and after reading the legend I was able to fill out my customer journey map, it was clear that this particular template was more suited to businesses looking to make profits rather than what I am looking at which is more of a humanitarian product designed for charities to help people. Despite this it still got me thinking and will be useful during my design process to ensure I meet user expectations. I did modify the journey map slightly by leaving out the sustainability section as well as who in the company was responsible as these sections do not affect my product design.
Here is my Customer Journey Map
While I feel this exercise was useful especially when I put myself into the shoes of users and thought about what they would want at each stage, I do feel this activity would be better suited to carrying out in a team environment. I feel that having a range of viewpoints would really help this exercise as I found it a challenge on my own. Having viewpoints from different areas of a business would help as well as people from customer service could bring in a different perspective and that could open up more insights and product improvements.
For my current project I’m not convince that customer journey mapping will be the most useful design thinking technique, with the nature of my product, its niche target user group and without a focus on commercial concerns this task seems to offer less useful insights than others such as empathy mapping or user personas. It certainly offers some insights such as considering the user’s needs when using the product in the wild. However if I was short on time it would more than likely be the technique I would leave out.
This is the first time I have sat and mapped out a customer journey like this and maybe I need to look to develop a better journey map for my needs. I do feel as if I am not as confident with journey mapping as I am with other design thinking processes currently, so some more reading and practice would certainly help moving forward.