User Experience Maps: Seeing Emotions Through the User’s Journey

Robin: ‘Personas and user experience maps—do you really understand your users, or do they exist only in your imagination?’ --- A user experience map tells a story visually, recording a particular user’s complete process of encountering, entering, and interacting with a product or service. New product managers easily make the mistake of planning from an administrator’s perspective. The resulting all-encompassing design is complex, comprehensive, and unfocused. That is clearly wrong. Redraw it along a target user’s actual path: how they arrive, experience each step, and finally leave. How can the ‘first sheep’ survive on your ‘pasture’ and enjoy itself? Mapping that sheep’s entire experience, beginning to end, creates a user experience map. ---- How to draw the map 1. A fully developed persona: understand the first sheep thoroughly. 2. Clearly described goals and expectations: why enter your pasture, and what does the user want? Someone buys a drill not to own one, but to make a hole in a wall. Someone dining may want to feel full, create an atmosphere, or have a conversation. Clarify the real goal. 3. Service touchpoints: between first contact and achieving the goal, where does the user encounter the product and need service? 4. The user journey: how does it relate to touchpoints? Moving through IKEA is the journey; asking an employee for advice or picking up free information from a box are touchpoints. 5. The emotional curve: situations must be capable of triggering emotions. How do feelings change throughout the experience? Plot the entire process from first contact to achieving the goal—or giving up. The horizontal axis represents the journey and touchpoints; the vertical axis represents emotion. You now have the curve of emotional changes during interaction with the service. ---- Avoid the administrator’s perspective. Many product managers simply list what products they have instead of considering what users want. The map should make you think as a user: can they reach their goal step by step, and is the process easy or difficult? --- Why Tencent tells user stories People rarely discuss data in Tencent’s internal work reports. Instead, they spend considerable time on feelings, detailed experiences, possible scenarios, and how different groups experience things. Inside Tencent, stories matter more than data. Data are like water flowing through pipes: an ongoing state and a result. User research is not about collecting scattered data to prove yourself right. It is about constructing a representative story. Everyone interprets data differently, with their own reasons and logic. Competing over data and logic often persuades nobody. Why stories rather than data? The boss wants to see how keenly you sense users’ experiences and how well you know them. An interesting definition of a relationship is: relationship = information. To judge your relationship with someone, consider how much you know about them and how often they voluntarily share updates. More information suggests a closer relationship. The depth, completeness, and insight of your understanding of a representative user story indicate your relationship with users. A good product begins by truly satisfying the first sheep. Know it so thoroughly that you can speak its language. Understand its story. A good product begins with a good story. --- To summarize the map and two central ideas: First, stories matter more than data. Second, a good product starts with a good story. ---- Case study: The Open University is Britain’s largest university and provides distance education. Its website connects students to the university and helps prospective students find it. Consider the changes in its interaction design. Initially, the course catalog was a typical database and directory: begin with a list of faculties, then enter detailed course descriptions. This assumed users primarily wanted detailed information on each course. It serves people who already know what they want. JD.com similarly provides strong search and catalogs for clearly defined needs, helping users find items through those tools. After launch, designers quickly found this was not the best course-selection design. Why? They assumed users knew what they wanted. In reality, users were novices: they did not know what to study or understand detailed course information. They cared more about realizing their dreams. Consider the university’s possible users. A few have straightforward goals: study, pass exams, earn a degree or certificate. Most do not know exactly which subject or courses to choose, or where the learning will lead. One story concerned Pritti, an older Pakistani woman who had abandoned education for her family. She wanted the degree she had missed when younger and came to choose courses. She wanted a first course that would improve her English reading and rebuild study habits. After searching hard with a friend, she chose advanced linguistics, clearly unsuitable for her. Explaining her reasoning afterward, she showed the product manager that every click had a good reason. Why, then, did she choose the wrong course? The website did not speak a language she understood or explain how to choose. Designed for users who knew their needs, it assumed descriptions were enough. Many applicants were actually novices who did not know what they wanted. The university therefore decided to show prospective students why others took a course, adding user stories to course descriptions. Stories included confused young people changing careers through study and older learners like Pritti returning to education. One account of earning a master’s degree in law read: ‘I studied hard for six years, more than sixteen hours a week, sacrificing enjoyable television time. It was absolutely worthwhile. I kept Sundays for relaxation and family, but reserved evenings and Saturdays for study to stay on schedule. That meant working until one in the morning. I maintained it for all six years.’ The course schedule appeared below that story. Would novices understand better after reading a life story like their own, recognizing the difficulties and sacrifices, and then seeing which courses the person took and how long completion required? What changed? Instead of assuming users understood every faculty and course and providing only standardized information, the university offered contextual stories that novices could understand. Its promotion shifted from ‘our teachers and courses’ to ‘our users and their stories.’ This resembled Taobao’s early promotion of remarkable seller stories, which spread more readily among sellers. Returning to the first sheep of our persona: Pritti was the new site’s first sheep, a novice sheep. Left alone, she picked the least suitable course. Had she begun it, she would not have persisted: a sheep unable to adapt would have died. If we watch only data rather than stories, our easy response is to bring in more sheep. Those users will certainly encounter problems. Under excessive conversion pressure, someone may rationalize the numbers or even manipulate them. That is what happens when conversion rates matter more than user stories.