Personas and User Journey Mapping in Human-Centered Product Design

Imagine you’re baking a cake for a friend. You wouldn’t toss in any random ingredients you find, right? You’d want to know what your friend likes – whether they prefer chocolate or vanilla, if they’re allergic to nuts, or if they love frosting. In other words, you’d want to understand your friend (your end-user) to make the best cake possible.

Personas in product design are a lot like understanding our friend’s preferences. They’re detailed, fictional characters that represent the key traits of a larger group of users in terms of their goals, needs, behaviours, and pain points.

Creating a persona involves your real user base’s research — interviews, surveys, or observations. For instance, if you were developing a fitness app, a persona might be “Sandra, a 30-year-old busy working mom who wants to stay fit but struggles to find time for the gym.”

The power of a persona lies in its ability to generate empathy and guide design decisions by constantly reminding you of ‘Sandra’ and her needs. Thus, the features you decide to incorporate in your app—like short, high-intensity workout routines or schedule reminders for workouts—would be designed to assist ‘Sandra’ in her fitness journey.

User Journey Mapping – Charting the Course

Once we have our personas in place, it’s time for the next step: User Journey Mapping. This tool helps us understand the path our users—like our friend Sandra—would take when interacting with our product.

In our fitness app example, Sandra’s user journey might start from hearing about our app from a friend. The next steps might be downloading the app, signing up, choosing a workout routine, and so on. Sandra will have different emotions, pain points, and needs at each stage, which can be plotted on the user journey map.

For instance, she might feel excited after hearing about the app but frustrated if the sign-up process is too complex. Recognising these emotions and their triggers can help us identify areas of improvement. For Sandra, we could simplify the sign-up process and provide clear instructions to ease her frustration.

By visualising Sandra’s journey, we can see our product from her perspective, helping us to design a user-friendly product that not only meets her needs but also provides a positive user experience.

Business Analyst in the HCPD Journey: Turning Frustration into Fulfillment

Robin F. Goldsmith (2004) used the above to highlight the disconnect between what users say they want, what developers understand, and what’s ultimately delivered.

This is where the role of a Business Analyst (BA) becomes critical. BAs are the connective tissue between the business needs and the technical team in the world of software development. They navigate the gap between business needs, user requirements, and technical capabilities to ensure the final product delivers value and meets the user’s expectations.

These requirements captured during discovery set the tone and parameters for the system under development. If these aren’t accurately captured, understood, and communicated, the chances of delivering a successful system decrease significantly.

However, as shown below, a BA’s role continues after requirement elicitation and documentation. They continue to engage with both the business stakeholders and the development team throughout the project lifecycle, providing clarifications, handling requirement changes, and ensuring that the developed solution aligns with the original business needs and user expectations.

Stages of Business Analysis in HCPD

1. Requirements Elicitation: Using personas like Sandra, a BA can clearly articulate what the user needs from the product. For our fitness app, these requirements might include a simplified sign-up process, workout reminders, or short, high-intensity workout routines.
2. Requirements Analysis and Documentation: Here, the BA breaks down the elicited requirements into smaller, more manageable parts, ensuring they are realistic, achievable, and clearly defined. 
3. Requirements Validation and Prioritisation: With our User Journey Map as a guide, the BA works with stakeholders to validate and prioritise requirements. Some features may be essential to launch (like a user-friendly interface), while others can be developed in later phases (like integrating a social feature for users to share their progress).
4. Supporting the Development Process: As the development team starts building the product, the BA is their point of reference for any questions or clarifications about the requirements. They ensure that the team is on track to build a product that genuinely serves users like Sandra.
5. Testing and Validation: When the initial product version (or ‘build’) is ready, the BA helps validate that the product meets the outlined requirements and serves the user’s needs effectively. This can be done through user acceptance testing (UAT) and reviewing feedback from real users.

The Symphony of Personas and User Journey Mapping

In the end, personas and user journey mapping work together like a symphony. They provide a solid foundation for effective human-centred product design by ensuring that our users, like Sandra, remain at the heart of our design process. By understanding our users and their interactions with our products, we can create solutions that truly resonate with them, leading to successful products and, ultimately, a successful business.

So, next time you’re tasked with product design, remember our friend Sandra. By keeping her and her journey at the forefront, you’re more likely to design a product that truly meets her needs, leading to a tastier ‘cake’—or in our case, a successful, human-centred product!