The Persona and Journey Map Playbook Designing Human-Centered Artifacts to Inspire and Drive Change

Most personas and journey maps crash land shortly after takeoff. This step-by-step playbook provides a revolutionary approach to creating these pivotal artifacts in product design through the concept of altitudes. They will guide you in conceptualizing your users through research techniques that directly inform persona characteristics.

Discover how to create personas that are free from irrelevant attributes and learn to develop high-altitude personas with sufficient lift to guide product roadmaps and organizational strategy. You'll also master constructing flight paths for journey maps that capture the user’s journey at the perfect level of detail, uncovering key moments in their experience. Then, as personas and journeys evolve, you will learn to measure the impact of product experience improvements.

With this book as your co-pilot, you'll navigate the creation process with the help of templates and real-world examples reflecting the latest methods for personas and journey maps. The Persona and Journey Map Playbook will provide you with the tools and strategies to create impactful personas and journey maps that will drive user-centered design and product success.

What You’ll Learn

• Integrate personas and journey maps into a cohesive user experience strategy.
• Gain practical details to design for users, avoiding common pitfalls of stereotyped and irrelevant personas.
• Utilize user research activities and synthesize insights to inform personas and journey maps.
• Understand the root causes of user experience issues through personas and journey maps to inform product roadmaps, create user requirements, and document future experiences.

Who This Book Is For

Product leaders, user experience designers, user researchers, or any roles responsible for understanding user needs.

Chapter 1 Representing Our Users.- Chapter 2 Why Most Personas Fail.- Chapter 3 Flying to New Heights: The Concept of Altitudes.- Chapter 4 Developing Persona Characteristics that Matter.- Chapter 5 Building a Persona Family Tree.- Chapter 6 Researching Your Personas.- Chapter 7 Synthesizing Data to Inform Your Personas.- Chapter 8 Constructing Your Personas.- Chapter 9 Designing Your Personas.- Chapter 10 Conducting Research to Understand Your User’s Journey.- Chapter 11 Synthesizing Data to Inform Your Journey Map.- Chapter 12 Creating a Flight Path for Your Journey Map.- Chapter 13 Adding Contextual Layers to Your Journey Map.- Chapter 14 Designing Your Journey Map.- Chapter 15 Keeping Your Personas and Journey Maps in the Air.- Chapter 16 Using Personas and Journey Maps with Other Artifacts.- Chapter 17 Charting Future Courses for Your Journey Maps.- Chapter 18 Launching a User Artifact Program.

Andrew Schall has over 20 years of experience as a UX leader, researcher, and strategist. He has collaborated with renowned organizations such as Citibank, Harley Davidson, The New York Times, National Institutes of Health, Office Depot, and Southwest Airlines. He currently leads a rockstar team of UX researchers at ServiceNow focusing on creating the next generation of employee-centered experiences.

Andrew previously served as the Senior Director of Experience Design Research at Mayo Clinic, where he led a team dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare experiences. At Mayo Clinic, he pioneered a new strategy for creating personas and journey maps to deeply understand user needs and guide product and service experience roadmaps. He has shared his innovative approach at numerous seminars and events, including UXDX and UXPA.

Andrew loves to share his knowledge and insights with the UX community. He co-authored the book Eye Tracking in User Experience Design and contributed to the book Measuring the User Experience. As the Director of Publications for UXPA, he oversees the Journal of User Experience and UX Magazine. Andrew is an experienced instructor teaching courses in user experience and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). He is an adjunct faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and has previously taught at Brandeis University, University of Washington, and Cornell University.