Building journey maps with ux pressure so i would say that today's webinar will be a little bit different from what we usually do because we don't go into some specific journey mapping case but rather try to look a little bit deeper into our platform explore its features workflow and some of the best practices to kind of help you understand how you can use it in your projects and gain more efficiency with the journey mapping so let me highlight our plan for today i want to start with a little introduction first get acquainted tell a little bit about myself and the company and also learn our today's audience then we'l go into high-level platform rvu to figure out how it looks feels and works on a basic level after that we proceed to a more in-depth look with visual assets collaboration and some of the best practices that we suggest to use i'l wrap it up with advanced stuff it won't be like super detailed but more a bit of preview of how deep you can go with the journeys and finally we'l have a q a session and of course a few subs during any of these blocks. Okay cool. So let's start and just a little intro about myself my name is vitali. And i am account executive here at geoexpression basically what i do i communicate with our customers learn their needs pains and helping them to explore the expression to make jury mapping more efficient and just in case if you guys need to the company.

Give you a bit of highlight of who we are first thing we're like at the heart of the company is human-centered design we're pretty much obsessed about it and in every direction our business we try to act from the perspective of human-centered design our main business is our tool platform for jury maps personas and impact maps but we also have educational part of the company which is called ux pressure academy this is where we design our educational initiatives for both teams and individuals to help them get started with the customer journey mapping on top of that we have consulting with public and corporate workshops i'm pretty sure many of you might have visited some of our workshops dedicated to customer interviews during mapping and other topics and of course events which is basically what we do today these are community meetups events from human-centered design-minded folks where we share the latest trends the best practices and trying to create a community of the human-centered design minded people definitely recommend following uxpression on even bright for more events like that so let's start with the following first.

How do we do journey mapping these days usually it's something like this it's basically white board with sticky notes where we just gather in the room and trying to brainstorm how the journey of our customers or users look like it used to be like that. But it's coveted era. So we're all working remotely and usually we then go to tools like excel sheets and powerpoint or visio to create journey maps like that it works fine for a certain time.

Three main pain points here although there could be more of them depending on your specific case the first one the process in these tools is not consistent because there is no single source of truth teams are using different terminology templates are not standardized and it's all become just very messy at a certain point. Second one it's difficult to collaborate in these tools because we leave in the comment areas i have said we work remotely and we need effective real-time collaboration tools and finally classic tools aren't tailored for the journey mapping because it's very time consuming to create proper visual assets in their the layouts for the artifacts and just make something visually appealing something that can help you to get a buy in from your stakeholders so quick stop here i'm curious if any of these or maybe all of this points somehow resonate with your previous or current experience right down in the chat. Okay. So just one more one person. Yeah. I see that a lot of people start answering all of the above. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So i'm glad to hear that we're in the same page here and this is where the expression comes in place so ux pressure is a collaborative customer experience platform it's basically one single place to create store and manage all of your cx assets the platform consists of the free modules customer journey mapping model personas module and impact maps all of these are interconnected into one another so you can create an ecosystem of the artifacts basically living and breathing library of the documents that can be shared with your team collaborated on so you can have very transparent and convenient workflow today we'l mostly focus on journey maps on personas because impact maps is a whole separate topic so from here let's actually jump into the platform and see how it looks and works.

So what you're looking at right now is an example of the journey map that was created a new expression so for today's session we've decided to go with pretty comprehensive and kind of understandable relatable example this particular journey map is something like customer support and software journey nothing too complicated but the same time that sort of journey exists in pretty much any industry these days so right now is just to understand the overall look and feel of the maps that can be created in the platform so let's have a bit closer look at what we have in here from the layout perspective it's pretty much an industry standard on the horizontal line you have stages or steps like in this particular case it's a problem then the personas go into help center. They inquire for help then their problem is solved. And maybe they do something after the issue is solved like a proposal for improvement or the feedback about the conversation on the vertical line you have a variety of different swim lanes surely all that can be customized which we'l see in just a few minutes but in this particular case you can have a user story user goes maybe storyboard channels problems in the experience graph and a few more sections that we'l also cover during this session. But this is just to understand like what's the journey map like from the structural point and what you can achieve within the platform the personas that you create for this journey map follow kind of the same visual pattern so it definitely benefits the overall consistency when you go with the same digital look it's just easier for you to get the buy-in from the stakeholders especially when you use standardized templates on all the projects and across all the teams and from here let's jump and see how all these artifacts can be created so once you're registered in the platform the first thing you see is the workspace with the dashboard in my case i have a plenty of different projects by default this dashboard is empty so all you have to do is just click and add project so that new project folder appear then the next step we suggest to have a look at the templates because it can be pretty tricky to start completely from scratch and to facilitate this to kind of give.

You the right start we have an extensive template library there are more than 70 different templates they're designed for various cases various industries and this is a perfect point to have a look at some of the examples or maybe even use one of these templates the cool thing about this is that some of the templates are just layouts so you have let's say the cgm for manufacturing which is pretty much a ready-to-use layout that you can customize and at the same time other templates are fully completed maps with all the content in here with all the sections field and ready to use so depending on your case whether you want to start from scratch or maybe use one of the completed maps you can use either one another and in case of the completed one you can also clearable content and have just the layout so in other words there are different options and it's very easy to get started with one of these templates over here then in terms of the customization.

Let me get back up to this menu select this empty template and let's have a look at how all of that can be customized so here within the journey map editor you basically have two main actions on the top right corner over here you can add the stages it's very simple and straightforward you simply clack on the stage and an empty column appears over here and just in case you can split the stages into sub stages as well nothing too fancy here pretty simple and straightforward process with a section the workflow is kind of identical. But you have three different categories i'l add a little bit of comment here to kind of give you more understanding of how this can be used so the sections are divided into three categories text type sections like user goals process touch points then you have visual stuff for visualizing experience charts and a few other things and of course media and files for adding let's say customer interviews maybe net promoter score reports or even pull the data from other tools we'l also cover that in the end the our logic here is designed with idea so you start with user goals then you highlight the process and indicate the channels. And then you have a full freedom all of these sections can be renamed so let's say if you have ideas and opportunities here you can rename this into tasks or if let's say the awareness stage is not something that you want to start with you will can you can just delete this unnecessary section and also of course move around all of that so the overall layout is fully customizable it's very easy to add new sections and the stages and the idea here is that you don't have to spend time to draw all of that. So basically in just a few clicks you have a completed layout for the journey map it looks great by default and you can start working not basically focusing on the insights and the content rather than the looks you already have the looks covered i'l make a quick stop here because i'm curious if the way how this journey map is structured resonates with how you usually build jury maps so let me know in the chat if it's kind of resonates with the way how you work with the journey maps or just let me know if you have any other questions for now. Okay. So it seems that there are new questions here this is more visual appealing customizable. Okay. Yeah. So aloe vera feel free to write down your question i will probably move forward now and we'l get back to that in the end when we get to the q a session. So let's probably proceed for now so this was like a template not a completed map but let's actually switch on to this fully completed map to figure out how you can work with that and what you can do in here first thing.

Attention to this map description section on top of the artifact this one is really important because it helps you to align with the team to clearly understand. Okay we have this map what is the goal what's the summary what's the legend it just really works well into putting everyone in the same page and clearly understand the purpose of the artifact you can add any number of these blocks over here customize the titles and of course add any content in here so make sure to utilize that to add more sense to your artifacts in terms of the logic and like the type of the content you put in here we usually suggest to start with something like persona story it just helps to to kind of think like a persona from the very beginning to resonate with them and understand them better then you can proceed to use your goals.

And maybe add a storyboard and also notice that if you need to add images or illustrations in any of these text blocks over here you can simply highlight the text click on this image icon over here and upload your own illustration add the link to one on the internet or select one of these stock illustrations that we have in here this is just a quick way to add the visual story to the journey map without the need to bug your designer anytime you need something like that then when you have like a few of this.

Basic section our suggestion to have a look at the channels because the channels are super important it basically visualizes how your personas like through which the way how your personas interact with your business so for the channels you have a variety of different icons that you can add over here of course you can add any content on top of that and depending on the way how that's how this can be visualized you can use different combinations just this water marks on the background maybe text plus watermarks or as an alternative you can go into a bit more advanced thing and use process and channel section which not only shows let's say the channels that are used but also visualizes the process that are happening let's say your persona is going into a website then they fill a web form over here and then schedule a call in zoom so this is like a linear protest that in happening on this problem stage over here so in other words there are different ways how this can be visualized so make sure to check both of the sections depending on your specific case moving forward we have the experience.

Graph over here the experience graph is the essential part of the journey map because first off it's the most apparent section it's something that you immediately look at when you see a journey map it can serve a variety of purposes but in the most classic way it's used to visualize the emotional flow of your personas so that you can clearly see how they feel on different stages on the journey and identify the pain points thanks to this visualization from the technical standpoint it's very easy to use this section because these are just sliders that can be simply dragged and dropped all different stages on the journey you can select from a variety of different emotions over here change the colors on each of the stage and of course add text boxes if let's say you want to capture the quotes of your personas or just add a bit more explanation at the same time this is like pretty simple example and if you go in the settings over here there's a lot more you can do with changing the number of experience line switching the smileys into circles or even adding the second emotion if let's say you want to compare your future state with the current state experience and basically show like hey this is this line on the top how our journey currently looks like it's not perfect and we're aiming at a little bit different different you know emotions of into the journey so make sure to use this to compare future versus current state journeys the charts can be used to add a bit more.

Data visualization over here nothing too complicated you simply put your numbers here like in this particular example i have something like a bug statistics on the problem stage so you can easily add like the sections for the chart indicate the numbers pick up the colors and clearly visualize to kind of like what sort of quantitative data is relevant to each of the stages over here the charts can be two different types so make sure to use both of them depending on what is more useful for your specific case moving forward i'l probably drop this section a little bit further over here we have problems.

As well as ideas and opportunities. So this works the following way classically like in the most traditional way i would say so let me just zoom out a little bit and drop this on the bottom so in the most traditional way once you have your emotional flow visualized so i'l probably delete the second emotion over here and get back to the three experience lines so once the emotional flow is visualized it's a good idea to start capturing the problems i know that depending on how many data you have in the very beginning and whether it's like real problems that were highlighted by the customers or just your assumption the whole concept of the pain points can be totally different depending on the specific scenario that you have in place so for that purpose make sure to check this tips section over here because here we collected some of the most common pain points related to process times costs maybe channels and touch points with the questions helping you to figure out how you can address different areas of the journeys and how this can be viewed in the context of pain points when you start to identify this you can visualize this in a number of ways of course the most obvious one is simply to highlight this and make sure to use the text editor to maybe make it a bit more apparent maybe make it bold in terms of the text or maybe even switch it to a different font so that sort of visualization definitely helps when it's when we're talking about like clearly see okay this is the journey map and these are our problems that we need to be that we need to address so just be aware of that feature and of course you can add the links to external resources add little spreadsheets within the cells so a lot of possibilities for the content editing at this point after that we usually suggest to proceed with the ideas and opportunities so basically this will be the solutions for the problems that you discovered during let's say brainstorming session or actually building the journey map and kind of having the high level picture once it's completed so ideas and opportunities can be supported by the best practices section over here this one is simply one of the section with one of the text sections that i've used i just color coded it a little bit differently name it differently. But it's a good idea to kind of have this support the ideas and opportunities to basically come up with certain solutions once the pain points are identified and this is i would say the most traditional way of structuring the journey map we'l go into more complicated stuff in a few minutes but right now i'l make a quick stop and check a few guys with me maybe have any questions so feel free to use this minute to drop the questions in the chat.

So the personas to be honest is a whole different topic because in like in the correct way when you start working with the journey maps it definitely worth starting with personas but at the same time a common problem that sometimes you might really lack a lot of data on the personas you might understand how the journey looks like. But you might not really know a lot about your customers of user or users so for that purpose when you're not sure where to start we strongly recommend to check out this tips and tricks section over here because this one is structured from the like from the content priority within the personas which sections are must-haves which are nice to haves and which are optional so use that to figure out the best way about like turning your personas into super detailed profiles or maybe starting with something high level just to have some generalized user or customer profile and of course then you can enrich that once you will be working on the journey in the future from the structure perspective the personas are a bit more flexible so the layout here allows you to drop the sections in pretty much any order adjust the width the titles and the text is obviously customizable the same way as within the journey maps and at the same time for the sections you have categories which are kind of identical to journey maps but they're customized for personas in a bit more specific ways so let's say in text and quotes you can have the background frustrations and motivations maybe needs an expectation so this is a whole different set of content that you eventually populate into these artifacts the visual stuff is also corresponding to the personas. So we have things like demographics section with a variety of different types of text fields that you can add the skills where you can indicate whether your person is text savvy whether they're prone to teamwork or whether they have or not the soft skills technology and channels can be used to visualize how your persona interacts with your business like what are the channels that are used all of the journey and it's a good idea to connect these with eventually the channels on the journey map so we have these correspondence between two sections so this is like a bit of preview of the personas but the workflow will be pretty much identical with the journey maps. Okay so moving forward let's have a look at what you can do with the journey map once it's completed so let's say that you have designed all these sections you think like hey this looks.

Well first off everything that you do within the platform is happening in real time so let's say if i'm making any change to the journey map i type something within this block it instantaneously reflected for everyone who has the access to the dashboard and the dashboard i'l go back into the first screen over here just your mind the dashboard can contain a variety of different projects so let's say if you're working on your own but you have a stakeholders who might be somehow involved maybe they want to see the jury map maybe leave a few comments or maybe even collaborate with you so for that purpose any of these projects can be.

Shared by inviting the person by email or just creating this direct access link so here you can also toggle the access type whether it's viewing and commenting or editing or you can even protect the link by the password this one is pretty convenient because let's say if you want to share the journey map with your boss and maybe he or she is too busy to go for his registration so this can work well and they can just simply go by that link and view your artifacts at the same time the exporting option allow you to go with one of the formats that we offer whether it's png pdf c-suite and powerpoint and you can also add the branding on top of all your artifacts basically put a log on maybe select from a few branded colors. Something worth mentioning here is that the pdf files have high resolution so if you need to print out the map in large format and maybe use it as a wall size poster for a workshop or just to evaluate this with your teammates all that can be simply implemented and the quality still will be great so everything here is high resolution vector based so don't be afraid to go with large format prints at this point and when the jury map is completed another cool thing to use is to turn it into a template the.

Template functionality is very simple once the journey map is completed you can simply copy and reuse that so we can just select the workspace select the project we usually suggest to create separate folder or maybe project for the templates and also there is an option to clearable content so depending on whether you want to use the map in its entirety or just have the layout both options are available for your convenience so moving forward the journey map is completed and in terms of the exporting and presentation there is something really important that we shouldn't forget about and these are comments work pretty.

Straightforward but at the same time it's a very powerful way of engaging with your teammates basically when you have someone invited as viewer editor or a contributor within the project or the or the workspace you can tag them in literally any part of the map that's really convenient because instead of like searching like hey which are which is what's the section you're talking about you can simply mark the person let's say over here tag them into the comments they will get notified. And then they this just goes as a discussion where you can resolve free open delete the comments and it's really way of collaborating in real time on the journey map.

For filtering the sections so here's the context let's say that you have designed a journey map and it looks great. But it's kind of bulky it like has maybe too much stages or the sections are cool. But maybe your executives are not interested in seeing each one of them maybe they don't need the best practices over here or the user story is not that interesting for them so for that purpose we have your we got you covered and you can use this view feature to filter the visibility of the sections and the stages i'l make just a quick example. So i basically hide a few sections over here you can also hide the stages if necessary then you just name it as a custom view let's say custom u1 save it and what happens next your map shrinks to a more compact version and after that you can go into exporting it into one of the formats presenting it in real time kind of bird eye overview of the entire artifact and the most important you can have any number of these views within and basically reach them in just one single click so make sure to use that because it drastically expands the possibilities for sharing and presenting the map instead of copying deleting unnecessary sections and have like just 10 versions of the same map you can have all of that in one single place simply by adding the new views and then returning to the original view in just one single click. Okay. So i'l make a quick stop once again to check if you guys are with me if you have any questions because we're go into a bit more advanced stuff. Right now. So i want to make sure that everyone is like clear on what they have seen so far all right awesome so seems that there are no questions in here so let's probably now go into a deeper depth of the jury maps and see what you can further do with all of that so this particular example was something like a classic journey map there was nothing complicated in here it's something that you can see quite often and it can work well for a variety of cases and industries but at the same time the functionality of the platform allows you to build more complex stuff and go more in-depth with the jury maps so right now i will switch to a few different examples it won't be the same map but different cases to just give you a glimpse of what you can further do with the artifacts and give you a few ideas of how all of that can be combined depending on your specification scenario so the first example over here it's something like buyer journey.

Basically sneaker store journey and here i'm combining multiple personas on the same map to show how similar or different their journey so from this functional from the functional aspect it's pretty simple so instead of having only one persona i'm adding a few of them and then i'm diversifying the sections let's say the customer goes the experience touch points or even pain points so pretty much any section can be diversified in here the plus of this approach is that instead of creating separate maps for the personas you can put all of them in one single place and visually compare how similar or different their experience is like let's say this is a buying journey so we have something like awareness product page comparison purchase stages and we can clearly see like that on the first three stages the experience is pretty much identical and when we're moving forward to the purchasing and on the way stages this is where the things are starting to get different. So that way you can create like a more in-depth understanding of the journey map depending on what your persona feels what their motivations frustrations and channels this can be compared in one single map and then the best part of it so let me get to the editing of this particular artifact is that once all these personas are in the same place you can simply hide and show them in one single click so basically it's flexible and dynamic map with multiple personas and once again depending on who is interesting for you at this moment and whom you're presenting your map to multiple personas can be toggled in one single click and visual compared in all these sections over here.

Speaking of the multiple personas another kind of like layer of how this can be utilized is the ability to show personas interaction here's another map example this is something like employee experience journey basically it's like when a person is searching for a job then they go through the candidacy then onboarding and let's say they're applied they're get the job and they're going into the first week of work over here. So something like applying plus and boarding journey from the employee experience standpoint so here we have also pretty standard set of sections like goals storyboard channels and experience. But if i look down i have this personas interaction section over here so basically what it's used for i'm showing how my customer employee or user persona interacts with the company side of the business. So i'm adding not only our customers or clients. But i'm also including the like the business side the company side like in this particular case i have an hr from the company i have a product manager and a technical writer basically it's the position our employee person applies. And i'm showing how all of them interact towards the journey. And i'm basically showing something like front station backstage processes what's happening what's really happening like what sort of interaction is going on different stages of the journey with channels with realization with showing how they interact with one another thanks to these lines over here so this is a whole new layer to journey and depending on your case it can be drastic it can like drastically expand the visualization and the understanding on what's really is going on here so really encourage you to use that section and utilize it in your journey maps because if you think like okay we stopped on the ideas and opportunities make sure to go to and explore the personas interaction and see how how further this can be used for the journey map and finally the third example of more.

Advanced stuff will be the content and what sort of like what sort of dynamic sources of data can be connected so this is. One more journey map example it's something like buy an insurance journey map with a few different personas and a few different goals basically they all go through the same journey but the content for the ish persona is quite different so it's quite complex map it has a lot of personas and a lot of sections but what i'm interested in right now is here in the bottom i have this content example and draft sections it might seem like. Okay. So we have some pdf file over here we have one more document so all that is cool but on the section on top i actually have something different going on and i'l go into editor to show it to you so i'm using here the section that is called ambit code so this one allows you to pull the data from other platforms and the main idea that this is a dynamic source of data in this particular example i'm having a few different content types i have a google type form over here i have a youtube video that i can play directly from the journey map i have google slides illustr a presentation over here prototype from figma which can be also viewed from here and also some slideshare presentation from linkedin so all of that works pretty simple you can simply use the iframe and embed feature to pull the data from one of these tools or pretty much any tool that supports embedding and the main idea that this will be dynamic source of data so it not just some static files these are actual like forms videos or presentations or visual prototypes that you store in these tools so you can update these on the go and. All that will be reflected within the journey dynamically as way so this is one of the ways how the journey maps can be made more alive with more dynamic sources of data and it just expands the entire like the entire data set that you can use within the journey that way. Okay. So i would say that would be like main overview of the platform with most of the features over here. So we have just a few minutes left because there will be a q a session as well so let's probably move forward with a few final things about the platform first off there was a lot of things told about the tool so in order to kind of recap all of that i encourage you to register and check our live chat over here because here we can answer your question in real time so just feel free to drop us a message you can also check our help center over here if you have any functional questions and just not sure how something work so you can simply search for sharing embedding and the questions will be directly here within this part of the tool and finally here we have this free journey mapping guide so if you're just starting with the tool or with the journey mapping in general we strongly recommend to check this out.

Because this is a very comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to start with the journey mapping and eventually with the platform let's say how to define the scope how to outline your customer personas how to define the stages in the journey and eventually how to go to the completed map with printing engaging the teams and regularly updating your maps so definitely recommend check up this out because it can help you to kind of get started with the tool get started with the journey mapping and figure out how this entire journey map and thing work. Okay. Cool. So i would say that this is pretty much it for my end high-level platform overview definitely we haven't covered any like every aspect of the tool and there is much more to it. But i think this will give you an overall idea of how this can be leveraged in your projects. So. Yeah. I'l probably stop here and just one final thing that i wanted to ask before we jump to the q a session. So i'm curious if this session was useful for you so i would ask you to rate it from one to five where one it's not useful at all five it was extremely useful so could you please pick up something that you think resonates with you from these five numbers just to see how well it worked for you. Okay cool. So since that's the audience today was pretty satisfied julia. So let's probably move forward to the q a session i suppose that there already were a few questions that were answered but if not feel free to drop them in the chat and let's probably start with this.

For a great platform or review and indeed we did already answer a couple of questions but i see more coming in and please do drop them in the chat if you have any left we'l be really happy to answer them so jason here has a question if you start with a general map without personas can you show how to add and combine personas after that. Yeah. Absolutely so it's pretty simple and straightforward let's say that i will just add a new project over here it's blank and i'l start with a blank customer journey or let's see maybe mobile app journey just to give a little bit different example. And. Yeah. It's pretty common situation when you can create a journey map but you don't have any personas aligned to that the reasons might be different maybe you're building just a high level journey for all the users. So it's not a persona specific maybe you don't have enough content and it's fine to start with the jury map first so i'l delete the persona from the project and as you can see right now it's empty so there is nothing in here it's just a journey map with all the sections in swimlanes but not personas connected and at some point you decide to add a persona so the best part like the best way of doing that is simply to go into the project folder over here add a new persona from the templates or maybe create a new one so i'l just like add a new one and you can either start with this or customize that and once it's done you simply get back to the journey map and then just click on that persona select from the existing one in the project and then it basically like now relates to this section so that's how percentages can be added to the journey and of course i can add more personas after that awesome thank you we have another.

Question from oliveira here if a user changes scores during the journey how do you address that in the map do you have any suggestions here. So if i'm getting this right changes course is like getting back to the previous step correct me if i'm wrong so for that purpose i would suggest to use processing channels section because one of the process types that we have here is bi-directional so basically it means that apart from going linear step-by-step there could be case when your persona is getting back on the previous stage so this process types can be this process type can be used for visualizing this scenario and kind of logically showing like hey our persona can actually get back on this particular step and another way of doing that would probably be to use the personas interaction section because so i'l just maybe let me see let me probably get to another map. Just a second. Yeah probably with the in-play experience over here and basically within this personas interaction swimlane you cannot only show like different types of interaction but also visually connecting it to the previous steps like to the previous actions between the personas so that way it can be used to visualize and of course you can add like a text comment on top to figure out like hey it's a. It's a backward action something like that so that would be probably the best way of showing in all different course scenarios depending on your specific case.