Journey Mapping for Smarter Strategic UX Decisions

What’s this course about?

Finding empathy with your customer can help designers, managers and marketers offer products and services that fulfill basic human needs and generate revenue. But empathy is a moving target: feelings, mindsets and behaviors are constantly in flux. That’s why any strategy based on a fixed persona or insight will have limited success. Instead, companies must weave together significant moments from multiple perspectives in order to map a composite journey.  

Journeymapping is a user-centered approach to document the way emotion, perception and behavior change over time. By highlighting both painful episodes and positive events, the process exposes vulnerabilities and suggests areas for improvement. And because journeymaps are visual and narrative artifacts, the methodology is a powerful way for organizations to plan.

In this two-part class, students will create their own journeymaps, using the arts-informed method Caleb Brown developed.

Topics covered include:

• Conducting authentic “visual interviews” of customers as well as internal stakeholders.
• Inviting participants to create hand-drawn paths to represent their experience.
• Coding paths so that they can be represented mathematically.
• Finding an appropriate metaphor for your map.
• Organizing the map with bands of positive and negative affect.
• Superimposing hand-drawn paths from interviewees.
• Identifying significant patterns and moments.
• Illuminating the larger human and data stories at play.

If your company is looking for opportunities to be more empathic and drive innovation, this is a simple, visual protocol to learn. It keeps real people at the core, and displays directional insight (including quantitative data) in an appealing visual way.

Who is this class for?

Any visual thinker on the front lines of design communication: product managers, account managers, producers, designers or user experience professionals.

Who will be teaching the course?

Caleb Brown

Boston, MA

Caleb Brown has been building human interfaces for 20 years and still gets enthused about making stuff feel good and work better. A Harvard-trained biologist and an honors graduate of Brown University in art and religious studies, Caleb also received a printmaking degree from the Kyoto University of Art in Japan. As a cartoonist, Caleb applies his skills to communication problems of all shapes and sizes. He works alongside clients like Monster.com, HubSpot, Tesla, Progressive Insurance, New Balance, Newman’s Own and Fidelity Investments. He is based in the Boston area.