Experience maps to analyze qualitative data - Miro Tutorial

- If you're just going to create one map most likely an experience map is the one you'll want. It'll teach you and your team the most about your users and it's a great starting point for creating other maps and visualizations as and when you need them. An experience map gives you an end-to-end picture of end users decision making processes, emotional state, and the steps they take to complete a specific task or set of tasks, whether or not they use your current product to do so. You can use the map to answer what if questions and as a basis for deciding what future research you need to perform. You create your experience map early in the process to guide subsequent research and development. An experience map has many benefits. Creating the map gets everyone in the organization on the same page about who you're developing for and what their issues are. The map gets the entire product team thinking about user needs based on their own analysis of the research data. It'll help you to uncover pain points in the process even ones which are outside the interaction that customers have with your product or company. Solving these pain points in a smart way creates very satisfied customers. Solving pain points that no one else in the industry is addressing helps to differentiate your product and gives you a lead over your competitors. The map provides a common vocabulary and understanding of user actions. This makes team collaboration much more effective. This type of map is great at both showing the big picture and also letting you dive into a smaller slice of it as necessary. Creating the map is a team activity. I like to include developers, product management, QA, marketing, and subject matter experts at a minimum. First, I invite all these team members to conduct observational research or video interviews. Then we get together to transfer the findings from that research onto sticky notes on a large wall. The best thing to write on each sticky note is direct user quotes that sum up that person's goal or issue at that point in the process. With even just eight to 10 participant observations you'll end up with a massive number of sticky notes. Arrange the findings by the time they occur in the interaction and group them into activities. This way the whole team can see the similarities and differences in how different users approach the same task. Creating the map can take a couple of hours. First, you'll just want to get all your observations and quotes up on the wall. Then you'll want to group similar observations together and arrange them in order of the sequence of events. You'll also need to create a label to describe each group of observations and to describe the phases in the journey. I talk about the process in a lot more detail in my course on analyzing user data but the main idea is to end up with a description of the end-to-end user interaction that's made up entirely of quotes and observations of what our participants were doing. After the team creates this map, they can identify the key pain points in the process which you'll then use as the basis for any design or redesign work of your product. This map is messy, but any team member who is involved in its creation can use it to tell stories about the user interaction. You can walk other people through the map and call out different pieces of data from the stickies on the map depending upon the particular emphasis you want to make. You'll find yourself revisiting the map at several points through the initial ideation and development process to help answer questions about which design direction is best or how to solve a particular issue.