A government client of ours routinely published content and wanted to improve their content production process. Managers were frustrated because the writing staff would routinely circumvent the mandated process because they felt it took too long to follow. Circumventing led to faster content production, but at the high cost of quality and accuracy.
We were asked to come in and help accelerate content production, while simultaneously improving content timeliness, accuracy, and quality. A seemingly tall order, we knew the only way we could succeed was to really understand the goals of the production process and what the writing staff experienced during every step. Only then would we understand why the process wasn’t working and how we could fix it. We started by creating user journey maps.
Journey maps articulate user (customer or end-user) pain points and opportunities, yet they are still widely under-used by organizations. Done correctly, a journey map tells the story of your target user and the experiences he or she goes through when interacting with your organization. It represents a timeline of customer activities, emotions, and organization touchpoints.
Journey Maps can be used by designers, marketers, product managers, and developers to create user empathy and provide context on how a user experiences your organization or a product / service within it. Journey maps identify user motivators (positive emotions and interactions) and demotivators (negative emotions and interactions) that can be used to identify opportunities to improve a process or solution as it relates to a particular user experience.
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Customer's Journey |
Buyer's Journey |
User’s Journey |
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The customer's journey is a visual representation of the stages people (end-users or customers) go through when buying and/or experiencing a product. It is often seen as a loop consisting of: |
In B2B sales, and complicated B2C sales, the buyer and the customer may be separate. Alternatively, the buyer's journey may be a subset the Customer’s Journey. |
While a Customer Journey represents the whole lifecycle of a customer, a user journey is used within UX to zoom into how a user experiences a specific product or service, including what screens they click on. |
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Within our work, we most often create user journeys because of their flexibility to validate broad product experiences or clarify specific services.
Download our customer journey map templates.
For our government client, we created user journeys for each employee role that engaged in the content production process. We held collaborative workshops with employees and mapped all major steps of the content process from their point of view. We then asked employees in each role to provide insights into their thoughts and emotions during each step of the content production process.
By focusing on each user’s emotional journey, we were able to identify the biggest pain points of the content production process. The negative emotions revealed why so many preferred to circumvent the process, which has less to do with how long the process was, but more to do with lack of transparency and trust between departments. This was eye-opening and unexpected for management.
Creating user journey maps served many purposes for us.
User research is the foundation of journey mapping—without research it’s easy to overlook key insights and simply take management’s word for it. In our case, journey mapping uncovered that the length of the content production process was merely a symptom of the problem and not the root issue at all.
