Journey Mapping Learning Experience Design
Journey mapping is a technique that utilizes storytelling and visualization to help designers understand the many dimensions of a person’s experience over time. Journey mapping was originally used in the service industry as a research artifact, where a journey is pieced together after conducting customer research. The artifact enabled design teams to understand the complexity of an experience.
As a learning experience designer, it occurred to me that if you replace “customer” with “learner,” the tool presents all sorts of opportunities for educational contexts. I’ve found it to be a wildly useful tool within my current context working at the intersection of user experience design (UX) and education (aka #edUX). I flipped the order, using journey mapping as an active tool instead of an artifact, often together with educators and learners we are designing for and co-designing with. In this context, it’s a powerful tool for deeply understanding an experience in order to support more effective lesson and curriculum design.
The basic elements of a journey map
A journey map is a UX design research artifact that utilizes storytelling and visualization to help designers understand user experiences and needs over time. Typical elements include a learning goal, high-level phases, activities, materials and tools, an annotated emotion map, and additional rows (“swim lanes”) to note barriers and opportunities, options for redesign, etc. The swim lane categories can be adjusted as needed for the context at hand.
Case study: Using journey mapping and design thinking to improve a circuits lesson
In my workshops for educators, I ask them to consider the experience of a circuits lesson through journey mapping and then brainstorm ways to improve it. We cover typical phases of design thinking: empathy, define, ideate, prototype and test. Most educators are either familiar with design thinking tools or intuitively grasp their function through experience teaching with simple problem-solving exercises and more involved project-based learning. What is surprising is how often teachers tell me that they do not bring these skills into their own work designing the experiences for their students.
Participants break into small groups, each taking on a distinct student persona as they experience a 4th-grade circuits lesson. They then use journey mapping to deepen empathy for that student, noting pain points and barriers as well as opportunities based on their persona’s strengths. This artifact becomes a guide for zeroing in on how to define the problem space and where to ideate solutions for a better, more engaging circuits lesson.
Armed with these tools, you too can harness educational user experience design methods to enrich everything from a single lesson to end-to-end educational ecosystems research and design.