UXPA Boston 2015: Lightweight Journey Mapping (Dove & Reinach)

Laura Dove and Stephen Reinach, UXers at MathWorks, presented at UXPA Boston 2015.

Background

• Simulink is a product used to visually code for low-cost computers (i.e. DIY robots, but even as sophisticated as automobiles)
• To use Simulink, Matlab customers need “hardware support packages”
• Matlab uses e-mails to inform customers about these packages (links at very bottom of email)
• Click the link, user goes to a webpage within Matlab site where download starts immediately (in the footer of the browser)
• Analytics showed 600 link clicks but only 20 installs
• Maybe users didn’t have the latest version of Matlab?
• Marketers wanted links to try to sell latest version, instead of direct download
• Hold on - why don’t we talk to customers to see what their experience was?

First attempt

• Face to face interview with someone who tried to install support package
• While she described process, every so often would ask for 0-10 rating of “pain”
• At one point she got really stuck, marked it a 10

What is a journey map?

• Journey maps have different names: Customer journeys, experience maps, customer journey maps, day-in-the-life
• what was common: organization was building maps for the customers’ journey (top-down approach); emotional component to the journey; at the end, an information graphic
• Started with basics: story of customer’s experience, capture emotional response to experiences, goal of teaching org about customers, end with an infographic
• BUT - customer would drive the process and needed something lightweight (easy to administer, easy to use, but still have an impact)

Approach to journey mapping they created

• Force participant to choose only 4 points in their journey
• Drag and drop interface for choosing emotion (looks awkward?)
• With journey map created, you can easily focus on future efforts to improve a customer’s experience

Now, first time they used with customers

• Each session took about an hour (orientation, background, interview/show-and-tell, two-minute orientation to j-mapping, participant does mapping, participant walks through, debrief)
• Did five sessions (with external customers)
• Customer would demonstrate steps while going through process
• Customers would use end-goals that were beyond what they expected (helped them broaden perspective)
• Customers use very different language to describe their activities, had to spend time abstracting into summary
• In the end - got more detail into key steps, more explanation of “why”, more discussion of habits & patterns

Example result

• Students didn’t know difference between “opening” a file and “downloading” a file
• Teacher had to ask students to switch firmwares in the midst of the lab
• Matlab’s assumption was that tech people would do configuration ahead of time

Findings

• Customers were avoiding (“almost frightened”) using e-mail links
• They preferred to do the download within the product
• Findings resonated with marketing people (though they didn’t quite understand importance of interview portion of process), then brought to upper level management
• Considered removing ability to download from web, tell users to start process within the product
• Management wanted to learn more, now in midst of a root-cause analysis

Follow-up

• better face diagrams for showing easy/frustrating”