Here are the situations when organizing a User Journey Mapping workshop can be of maximum benefit for your company or a project:
- When you plan to launch a new product or a new feature.
- When you want to introduce a new flow to your existing product.
- When you'd like to run an audit on your current UX (or business) process.
- When looking for a new strategy and considering a pivot to your product.
- When you need to create new KPIs for measuring performance.
- When you need to verify your users' needs and the product's pain points.
UJM is a workshop methodology that can significantly improve the organization of your knowledge. We've been using this framework for several years, and each time our clients have the opportunity to learn something new about their customers (users) and themselves.
We have applied UJM in different projects for both startups coming up with new innovative products and for corporations with developed, established systems, where we often took over just a part of the development process. We've done it in different industries, for clients from Istanbul, London, Oslo or Warsaw.
From this experience, we learned that although the mapping methodology is well proven while you can do 60% of the workshop "by the book," still a good team needs to improvise around 40% of the time. Why is that so? UJM is a complex and creative process because usually some pieces of the puzzle are missing and you need to figure out how to fill in the blind spots of knowledge. For example, sometimes no one in the room knows the answer for a specific tech issue - that's the time when you need to speculate a bit. It's also a process where the interaction between the participants can have a major effect on the product. That's why you almost always need a highly skilled facilitator to make the most of the workshops.
A great UJM team knows how to do it by the book, but also knows how to improvise. By far the most effective way of having a workshop is to have everyone in one room. If it's not possible for everyone to meet face to face, then we can arrange a workshop through Skype.
