Background

As a product, the Bluemix team is comprised of over 300 Engineers, Designers, Researchers, Product Managers & VPs.

Bluemix/IBM Cloud Dashboard.

The Problem

As a large product team, many of us knew the experiences we were delivering were painful for our end-users.

But, because we’ve lacked a formalized method for capturing, tracking and sharing user pain points across the organization, many of our users problems were being overlooked or ignored.

My Task

Build empathy for Bluemix end-users by creating a methodology that captures real user pain points and usage metrics in a format that can be consumed by designers, product managers and engineers.

Personas & Stakeholders

(AKA The people using my work to drive improvements into Bluemix)

Journey Maps to the Rescue

Journey Map Examples

Hypothesis

Creating a consistent format for building journey maps will help design teams identify, capture and share user-needs and pain points.

My Goals

I started my research by looking at what makes a successful journey map.

Research Synthesis

From my research, I found the following patterns crucial to creating a successful journey map:

I also looked at some of the issues with traditional journey maps.

Example Journey Map from Adaptive Path.

• Traditional journey map diagrams can be dense and difficult to decipher.
• Traditional journey map diagrams are not easily presented.
• Traditional journey map diagrams lack screen-by-screen visuals.
• Quantitative data points are often left out of traditional journey maps.

Phase 1: Creating a Format

From the initial research conducted I was able to take a first pass at putting together a format for capturing user journeys.

To keep journey maps transparent, they were initially captured in table format on our internal Wiki pages.

1. User Success Criteria & Background Info

2. Summary, Highlights & Pain Points

3. Annotated Screen-by-Screen Journey Walkthrough

4. High-Level Sentiment Diagram

Initial reception was great!

Initial Reception

In a one month span:

• Created a detailed methodology for capturing user journey maps.
• Captured journey maps for 8 different scenarios with sponsor users.
• Clearly identified and created issues for over 80 individual pain points.
• In combination with Amplitude we identified the cause of a 44% user drop-off.
• Shared findings across the Bluemix product teams.

🤗  The journey map format was a success.

I thought I was done! But...

“These are great, but I need a better way to present them.”

“These are very dense, there’s a lot to read through.”

Teams required a better format than a wiki page for presenting journey maps.

Phase 2: Template Kit

I adapted the journey map format into a set of Keynote template slides to be used internally by design teams. The template slides are highly visual with a focus on telling the story of a specific user journey.

The journey map kit is comprised of 4 base template slides.

1. Journey Title Slide

2. Journey Overview Slide

3. Detailed Walkthrough Slides

4. Biggest Problems Slide

Final Results

Since the inception of the template kit:

• All Bluemix product design teams are now required to create journey maps for each aspect of the experiences they own.
• Product teams have created and shared more than 40 different journey maps for various platform experiences.
• Over 400 unique pain points have been captured and prioritized by design and development.
• IBM Design is working to adopt the methodology and template kit into their design thinking curriculum,