SpareFoot Customer Journey Maps

One of my favorite parts of my job is creating UX Research artifacts that help promote empathy for our customers and serve as visual aids during design workshops. Customer Journey Maps are a helpful tool that paint a picture of what a customer is thinking, doing and feeling as they move toward accomplishing their goal.

Gather and Parse Qualitative Data

It was important to collect as much qualitative data as possible to identify patterns and commonalities throughout each journey. We conducted one-on-one interviews with several people that fit our personas. After the interviews we worked to synthesize the information and began to see the skeleton of each journey form. It became clear we would need a flexible template that could accommodate the various experiences of each persona.

Below you can see the raw notes from the interviewees that represented Charlotte. Charlotte’s persona lives in a large city and uses self-storage as an extension of the small apartment she shares with her roommates. She stores her personal items and needs fairly frequent access to her unit. She values a close location, security and is on a mission to save as much money as possible.

Layout, Structure and Creating a Narrative

After we documented our findings we began to construct a narrative. A Senior UX Researcher and I mapped out Charlotte’s journey (seen below) by clustering each task she went through as she moved toward her main goal. We grouped the generalized thoughts, feeling and actions of all the interviewee’s and plotted them within each task.

We noticed tasks often overlapped with each other, though the time spent on a task ranged from one day to several weeks. For example, most interviewees spoke of organizing and packing their belongings and researching storage simultaneously; though their thoughts, feeling and actions differed depending on the task they were immediately focused on.

This meant that our journeys didn’t fit nicely into the traditional linear journey map that was often seen in our comparative research. Our challenge was to clearly display a complex journey with multiple steps, that may or may not overlap, across a varying timeline.

Once we reviewed our findings and completed a loose storyboard we had the realization that this more closely simulated a Gantt chart. Gantt charts are designed for multiple projects over a varied timeline, rather than a standard linear journey where one step occurred, then another and so on.

A Collaborative Process, Gathering Feedback and Iterating

Gathering feedback throughout the design process from different perspectives was really important. These journey maps were intended to create value for everyone within the company, and it was crucial that they were clear and easily understood by anyone.

The template evolved through many rounds of feedback. Early wireframes included much more information than than the final result. Some key pieces of feedback and design decisions included:

• Remove the persona information—the thought here was we already had the persona information that would be reviewed in detail at the workshop and we wanted to emphasize focus on the journey. Instead we opted to convey their goals through a summary quote next to their name and photo.

• Incorporate the emotions into each step of the journey—because these journeys were nonlinear it became very complicated to show emotions separately, and it made more sense for them to nest within their own task.

• Omit the opportunities and recommendations—identifying these were part of the overall business goal behind the map and we didn’t want to be prescriptive with our solutions and miss out on other ideas.

• To print or not to print—the team went back and forth on this and ultimately decided to keep our assets digital. This allowed us to test their effectiveness in workshops and make updates and iterations as needed.

Customer Journey Maps for Charlotte and Amy

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