Remote journey jogging: Executing UX in a post-COVID world
Journey Mapping can be done successfully while working remotely with just a few tweaks to the process.
Co-author: Victoria Claypoole
We made it! Well, sort of. We’re not out of the woods by any means, but we all “made it” in terms of adjusting to new ways of living and working due to the current global pandemic. Part of the adjustment has been taking old UX tools and breathing new life into them so they can be done remotely. As it turns out, there are tons of online tools available to conduct UX tasks — after all, plenty of companies worked in a completely remote environment way before COVID-19. However, as our team transitioned to fully remote, we didn’t find a ton of online help that described exactly HOW to transition our UX tasks into an online, remote environment and which tools were best for the job. For instance, one of our favorites is Journey Mapping — a tried and true UX activity. Journey Mapping is an uber common UX activity, but how can it be executed effectively in a remote environment?
The Problem with Journey Mapping
If you’ve conducted Journey Mapping sessions before, you know that it can sometimes be a grueling and drawn out process. I know on our team, we would often spiral down rabbit holes that sidelined the main objective of this activity, to understand what our users will be experiencing as they weave our tool into their lives. In the past, these discussions have often led to 4–5 hour long sessions.
Then, when it was all over, we would spend an hour or two taking our physical stickies and recreating them digitally. After hand-jamming our session into a digital format, we would often wonder how we could turn all our hard work into something actionable…what do we DO with all of these great ideas??
The following is a Journey Mapping framework, we’ve call Journey Jogging, that is adapted to be conducted more effectively, even while being remote. To get the most out of this framework, we’d provided a handy guide on who should participate in Journey Jogging, what their actual roles are, and step-by-step instructions on how to start joggin’! By the end of this article, we hope you’ll be able to execute this UX task more efficiently (even remotely) and get actionable results that drive your system design.
Team Roles
In the past, we (the UX person on the team) would often be the main facilitator of a Journey Jogging session while also being an active participant. That amount of task switching means you’re never really playing either of those roles well. The UX voice is critical for this activity to work, so it’s important that task switching is limited. We suggest using an independent facilitator (more on this below), so that you can make the most out of your Journey Jogging session. Additionally, it’s important to have the right voices in the room. We know everyone hates more meetings — even “working meetings” — but getting a shared understanding upfront and allowing all roles to have a voice early in the process can save a ton of time later down the road (and even reduce additional meetings later on). Our team’s current set up is the following:
Journey Jogging Facilitator
We’ve found that having our Business Analysts or SCRUM Masters facilitate the session means you as the UX person can be more engaged in the process. It’s important that you and this facilitator meet beforehand so you can introduce them to your personas and outline the key phases of the journey together.
Product Owner
Having your Product Owner be part of the process is key. If they can be part of the journey, they’ll have a shared understanding of why specific features might be crucial to your system.
Tech Lead
Journey Jogging shouldn’t be bounded by technical feasibility just yet (we’re ideating here), but your Tech Lead may have practical solutions to problems you find throughout the user’s journey. They also see the world through a different lens and can provide a different perspective on the user’s experience.
Other UX-ers
Gather all the UX Designer & Researcher co-workers you can. The more UX voices in the room the better. Depending on the size of your company, you may be the only one, but you can sub in other co-workers with creative minds.
Tools
Our team has used both Miro and Mural for Journey Jogging. We love Miro for its dynamic grid template. If one of your columns become too full, you can easily resize and adjust to accommodate. Miro is free with limited features and export options. The templates, easy UIs, and FREE nature of Miro make it our go-to tool for Journey Jogging. Other tools, like Mural and UXPressia, have Journey Mapping templates you can try for free. Mural is free for a limited time while UXPressia is free for one persona and map at a time. Each tool has its own list of pros and cons, but at the end of the day, all you need is a tool that is collaborative and allows multiple users to be live editing at once.
How to Jog
The structure of Journey Jogging is very similar to vanilla Journey Mapping. Journey Jogging differs in that everything is time boxed, and discussion only happens after a phase is complete. Figure 1 shows a real example of one our Journey Jogging sessions. In this session we were completing a Jog for Sean, an Aircraft Inspection Technician who needs to capture identified defects while receiving operational support. As you can see, there is a strict agenda that allows us to get the activity, and resulting discussion, time-boxed. No more 5-hour Journey Mapping sessions that go down endless rabbit holes. Obviously, if something EXTRA CRITICAL arises, we can adjust the agenda or take it offline. However, 99.9% of the time we continue as intended and Alice gets to leave Wonderland.
Phases (Columns)
First, we break the whole process up into high level phases. This will differ greatly depending on the application and the user persona and should be planned beforehand. Examples of phases for our ARTISAN project were “Set Up,” “Complete Inspection,” and “Wrap Up.” It’s important to think about the before and after phases in your user’s journey and add those to the process as well. Typical Journey Jogging Sessions will have 4–6 phases.
Tasks, Thoughts & Feelings, Opportunities (Rows)
Next, we break those phases down even further into Tasks, Thoughts & Feelings, and Opportunities. We go one phase at time, focusing on one subsection at a time. Each subsection has a time limit of 3–8 minutes. The facilitator says “Go!” and everyone starts filling in the stickies, with no or little discussion. The facilitator is responsible for managing the timer. They should update the participants on how much time is left, and when it’s time to move on.
Tasks can be big (e.g., “log in”), or small (e.g., “enter username”). Instruct your team to try and think of everything the user will have to do in this phase, even if it’s something outside of your system. The nature of doing this online means that everyone can see what everyone else is writing at once, so duplicate items usually happen less frequently than with in-person Journey Mapping.
After the timer runs out on Tasks, have your team move on to Thoughts & Feelings. They can be positive, or negative, in fact the negative ones often lead to rich features that enhance the overall experience. Examples of stickies during this subsection could be “Oh great, another account sign in to remember” or “Why do I always have to log in? Can’t this system remember my credentials?”
Last, we tackle Opportunities. As before, look at your Thoughts & Feelings, and let them lead you towards potential remedies. Examples of Opportunities are “Give users a checkbox that allows them to choose if they want to remain logged in” or “Let the user use their Gmail login instead of having to create an account.”
Once you make it all the way down the column to Opportunities, it’s good to reserve a few minutes to talk about the outcomes. However, this discussion should also be time boxed. Your team will keep working in 3–8 minutes increments until they complete each phase.
Even with the very tight time limits, we’ve found that our team comes up with great ideas fast.
Doing this activity in a digital format means people can quickly type and create new stickies in seconds, as opposed to writing manually and then taking time to walk over and stick them to the board. We get just as many, if not more, ideas down for each subsection compared to our in-person sessions. We’ve also been able to blow through Journey Maps for several personas in one 2-hour session. Another advantage of using something like Miro is that teams are able to gain consensus on a particular sticky, without discussion, by marking them with a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji.
Now What?
By the end of the process, you will have a ton of great ideas, many of which won’t make it into the final product. In order to figure out which ideas make the cut, have your Journey Jogging Facilitator take all the Opportunities and throw them in a spreadsheet with the other known themes and features. Or better yet, set up an area in the same Miro board. In a separate session, get your Product Owner, Business Analyst, and yourself to agree on priority for each Opportunity. Rank everything as Priority 1, 2, or 3. Don’t throw your 2’s and 3’s away! Have your Business Analyst or SCRUM Master add them to your backlog for future prioritization.
Conclusion
Journey Jogging is an effective ideation tool that can be done remotely with great results. Set up your user personas and phases before-hand, time box EVERYTHING, and prioritize your Opportunities at the end. Besides the concrete outcome of having features added to your backlog, your whole team will end up with a shared understanding of your users’ experiences with your product.
