Often, journey mapping is perceived as a tool for user experience (UX) architects, researchers, and strategists. It doesn’t instantly come to mind as a useful tool for business analysts. However, journey mapping is a very useful tool for business analysts. The journey mapping process lends itself to collecting information for tasks and user stories to develop user requirements.
Requirements-gathering workshops may be perceived as tedious. However, integrating a journey mapping exercise with a representative user group or stakeholders makes the process more enjoyable and interactive. Stakeholders in the workshops are compelled to think like their users and consider their various tasks and challenges. Participants go from one session to another, whiteboarding, actively engaging with the facilitator. The exercise assists them in thinking through and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of solutions and developing a particular set of user requirements.
To plan and conduct a successful journey mapping workshop to collect user requirements, don’t fail to consider the following:
§ Plan two workshops, one for a representative user group and one for the stakeholders. The stakeholder workshop will assist in aligning expectations and help business analysts unveil perceived user and business needs. The representative user group will share their thoughts, assisting the business analysts in understanding their perspective to come up with a more useful and thoughtful set of requirements.
§ Develop a succinct presentation to describe journey mapping. The concept may be new to your user and/or stakeholder group(s). Explain journey mapping, its usefulness for the project. Additionally, explain the process you’ll be taking your participants through during the workshop.
§ As your user and stakeholder groups go through the process of mapping tasks, talking through the people/things involved and the emotional experience in every step, attention must be focused on the mentioned tasks and why a user needs to perform these tasks. This is when your user stories will arrive, and you’ll be able to probe deeper with the group while you have them all in one place.
§ Encourage input from every participant. Assure your groups that there are no incorrect answers and that they’re crucial to the requirements-gathering process. Usually, there’s a tendency for one or two participants to dominate the conversation. By asking participants to verify steps or tasks in the process, asking them other questions, you can actively engage them. This will offer you a more balanced view of the actual needs and tasks.
§ Don’t forget to question participants for their input on solutions. While journey mapping isn’t an exercise that will give you a solution, it’s quite helpful to ask who experienced the issue or problem more frequently and how they might solve it. They’re closer to the task than anyone else.
If you want further insight on how journey mapping is useful for business analysts, you can hear it from Jaakko Männistö – the customer journey analyst himself.