I have a confession to make - when my workplace started to go bananas for customer journey mapping, I didn’t see much of a difference between what a journey map offers and what is provided through traditional UX research techniques. To me, customer experience journey maps were just a new buzzword for an old thing. 

In one respect, that statement is entirely true. A good customer experience journey map begins with a persona, and includes the user’s flow. The persona and customer journey map are founded in first-person customer research - the hallmark of good UX research, not on the business’s assumptions or generic marketing demographics. Usually this information is gathered from one-on-one interviews with customers, observing the customer using the product or service in the wild, surveys, message board and social media posts, and digging into customer feedback channels and analytics.

From there, the journey map deviates from the typical UX research deliverables. Instead, it is a representation of this persona’s interaction with the product or company from end to end - the customer’s initial need for a solution, their discovery of the product or service, deciding to purchase the product/service, and what it is like to be a customer or owner for the life of the purchase. Often UX user flows assume one thing - the customer is already a user. It ignores the period before adoption where a lot of decisions are made, and it often doesn’t address all the phases of a user’s relationship with the company. 

Another aspect of a customer journey that is lacking from traditional UX documentation is that the customer’s emotional journey is illustrated with equal weight alongside the customer’s interactions with the product. What is easy or delightful and frustrating or confusing during the process is called out boldly in a customer journey map. In addition, the product’s marketing efforts and customer touch points are overlaid with the same clarity. It’s a complete snapshot of the journey, whereas a user flow is just a piece.

The biggest difference, though, is that a customer journey map and persona are agnostic of the technical solution. It’s a customer need-finding tool that identifies opportunities for new products, services, or features. In 12 years of working in user experience, UX research generally begins once the product or service offering has already been identified - the client wants a new website, the company needs a tool to do the following, etc. User experience research sets out to create useful and satisfying designs within the framework of a solution, whereas customer experience research sets out to determine what will be a useful or satisfying solution - and therein lies the value.

I recently finished reading Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray and I can’t stop telling people about it. None of the descriptions of this book do it justice (and neither will mine), but it’s about how people form beliefs, what happens to human interactions as a result of beliefs, and how to change beliefs (or your understanding of people’s beliefs). Like I said, this book defies description. But, it’s a quick read, so I strongly suggest you do. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking about why customer research is often flawed. If you’re a researcher on a project - maybe making personas or journey maps about an audience’s experience - you’ve already done a lot of initial research, maybe talked to the client and heard their opinions, formed your own judgments, made some assumptions, and already thought of a few solutions. It’s only natural. But these are also the thoughts that will color your research, and perhaps skew it toward your preconceived notions. It is easy to interview people, write surveys, and run focus groups that are unwittingly structured to validate your own assumptions.

How do you avoid skewing your own research? Gray offers some liminal thinking practices as a solution, and I’ve identified three that I think are the most helpful. 

Assume That You Are Not Objective

Gray shares a great anecdote about a boss who shoots the messenger when he hears bad news. Because the boss reacts poorly, his employees stop telling him things. After a while, the boss feels out of the loop and wants to find a way to change it. What the boss doesn’t realize is that his reactions caused this cycle - he needs to change his behavior to get his employees’ behaviors to change.

Now, imagine that you are a UX researcher and you’ve worked on a product for years. You know why things work a certain way. While you’re researching, users keep bringing up issues, but because you’re so close to the product you dismiss what they’re saying because it “had to be that way” or it’s “not in the budget.” Meanwhile, an outsider might find these insights to be the most valuable part of the research - possibly the key to designing a better product.

If you’re part of the system, you need to approach things like an outsider and assume that you are not objective. 

Empty Your Cup 

Emptying your cup is one way to get an outsider perspective. This means that you have to consciously suspend your judgment. Let go of any knowledge you have on the subject and forget your theories, preconceived notions, and assumptions in order to let other people’s thoughts and beliefs in. This is hard, but it is possible! 

How do I do this? While I’m in a research mode, I do not let myself dwell on theories or solutions. When they inevitably come to mind, I control them by writing them down in my notebook so that I’ll have them for later. Then I block the thought out (knowing I have it noted) and continue researching. 

For example, I was working on a project where I was interviewing about a dozen people who were considering an optional medical procedure. At the start of my interviews, it seemed like health insurance coverage was an enormous blocker. I jotted a solution in my notebook that said “make it easier to check insurance - maybe an online tool?” By the time I had talked to everyone on my list, I had learned that determining insurance coverage was a simple phone call that many people easily made. Those who weren’t calling the insurance company weren’t ready to commit to saying yes or no to the procedure, so they procrastinated while they thought more about it. It was a different problem (and a different solution) than the one I had identified earlier. 

If I had clung to my early idea, I could’ve used my interviews to validate the idea. I bet if I asked everyone I talked to, they all would have liked an easy online insurance coverage checker. But my insurance-checker idea probably would not have changed minds or solved the bigger issue of fear and uncertainty around the procedure itself. 

Triangulate and Validate

The story I just told also brings up the practice of triangulating and validating. With this, Gray encourages people to not just assume that they know what’s going on. Talk to as many people as you can, and to as many different types of people as possible. For my project, I talked to the client, to the medical office staff, and to people who were considering the procedure, in the process of having the procedure, and those who had recovered from the procedure. I read message boards and Reddit strings, online health information, and more. I tried to examine the research through a lot of different lenses so I that I could gain deeper insights. 

As difficult as it is, for the best customer insights you have to let go of your own theories and stay flexible about the outcome. If you manage to do this - even just a little bit - you’ll understand your subject more, and you’ll be able to make an empathetic connection with your customers.

Whether I’m recruiting usability test participants or planning customer research, one of my go-to survey tools is Google Forms. I often find myself turning to online survey tools for things like participant screeners for usability testing or user interviews, and I also use it to perform market research and customer surveys. Plus, Google Forms is free, which matters a lot when your client has a small budget or doesn’t need the full capabilities of a paid survey tool. 

Though there are a lot of freemium and free survey tools out there, Google Forms offers a handful of valuable features, and I know that the service is reliable - it’s not a start-up that is going to be shuttered or sold to someone else a month from now. At the risk of sounding too much like an informercial, here’s a list of the many reasons why I like using Google Forms to conduct online surveys. 

Advantages to Using Google Forms for Surveys

• First and foremost, you’re able to build robust surveys with conditional logic. Really, as much logic as you need. Though the editor portion of the form tool can get unwieldy, you’re able to make a friendlier survey experience for your audience with low effort and at no cost. 

• You can collect a lot of survey responses. At the time of this writing, you can collect 400,000 responses if you import to a spreadsheet, and unlimited responses if you only use the tool’s built-in reporting.

• Your data is portable. You can download the responses into a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file so you can import and analyze the results in whatever stats tool you’re comfortable with. Also, you can easily save a copy of the raw survey data outside of the tool for posterity. 

• Lastly, Google Forms can be be customized with an image. Adding an image automatically changes the color scheme to match. So, the survey can match your brand if you need it to, which makes the survey feel more credible (and removes some of that “cheap” Google Form aesthetic).

With Google Forms, cost is never a barrier to reaching out to your users or your customers - you will always have a free, highly capable tool to help you collect information and gain insights from your audience. 

Imagine the following scenario. You’re a UX or CX researcher, and you’re working on a website redesign. You’ve had some preliminary meetings with your client and you’ve done a little of your own research about the marketplace. Based on what you know so far, you have a few ideas that you think would be great for the new website. You’ve set up a half-dozen interviews with your client’s customers to understand their needs, and during the interview, you bring up one of your ideas to solicit their feedback. 

Interviewer: “Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to [XYZ] online?” 
Interviewee: “I never thought of that before. I guess so…sure!” 
Interviewer: “It would be quicker and more efficient…”

Do you believe the interviewee really wants this feature? 

If you answered yes, perhaps you shouldn’t have. When you’re conducting user interviews for research, every question that you ask and every topic that you introduce has the potential to skew your results. There are several types of bias that may influence the interviewee’s response to this type of questioning. 

Politeness and Halo Effect

Often, people will be polite in their answers to spare your feelings, to be friendly, or to build a rapport. There’s also a chance that your interview subject doesn’t want to make waves in his organization, or maybe she or he fears that a negative response will get back to a boss or an important contact. 

Alternately, if you’re conducting interviews and you’ve been introduced as an expert in the field, your interview participants may think you have special insight, and your position might cast a positive glow over all of your suggestions, whether they are good ideas or not. This is called "halo effect." 

Tips for remediating politeness and the halo effect: 

• Downplay your level of expertise and your own investment in the project. “I’m just the researcher…”  

• Tell them you’re at an early stage in your research, even when you’re not. 

• Say that negative feedback is encouraged, and is often more helpful than positive feedback. 

Query Effect

The Nielsen Norman Group cautions researchers to be aware of the query effect. They claim that when you ask someone for their opinion, that person will come up with an opinion, even if it is unimportant to them or is about something they have very little information about. 

Tips for reducing query effect: 

• Ask followup questions that dig deeper into their need and prompt for specifics. For example, ask if they had the proposed feature for 5 days, how many times would they use it based on their current workload? How much time might a feature like this save for them personally? Try a technique like asking why. 

• Even better, don’t ask if they want a certain feature. Inquire about their current experience and whether or not they have any suggestions for improvement. They might suggest the feature. If possible, observe them doing whatever process it is that you’d like to replace or improve. 

What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI)

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman proposed a theory called What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). Kahneman suggests that your mind is hard-wired to tell a story based on the information you already know and to draw a conclusion from it, forgoing additional research. In the scenario above, the interviewer's findings from her preliminary research made her instinctively identify problems and formulate solutions. This is completely natural, but it can stop you from gathering more information and possibly finding a more appropriate solution. 

When conducting need-finding interviews with users or customers, your primary goal is to deepen your knowledge and to find out what you don’t know. User interviews should not be used to gain confirmation or sign-off for your ideas.

Tips for reducing the influence of WYSIATI: 

• Be open to new information. Although you will absolutely come to the interview with assumptions and solutions, don’t share them with the participant. Pretend that you are a complete novice. Avoid steering the conversation too much in one direction or inadvertently selling the participant on your idea.

• Ask questions like “is there anything else that might be useful to us as we research XYZ?”

When in doubt, it’s always best to keep solutions out of need-finding interviews, and instead focus on gathering as much information as possible about the problem. Save coming up with ideas and recommendations for after you’ve completed all your research, when you can properly reflect on more comprehensive findings. 

In my working life, I've attended tons of discovery sessions, conducted informational interviews and usability tests, listened to vendor demos and been in too many meetings to count. The thing that gets me the most are the questions. 

You have questions! This is good. What is not good is asking more than one at a time. You know the type. Those massive questions that stretch on and on, asking for 3 or 4 things, that include various other points as you go along. By the time the questioner has stopped talking, the answerer: 

1. Doesn't remember any of what was asked.
2. Only remembers the last question, or the first, or whichever one they managed to cull from the oratory.
3. Only chooses to answer the easiest question.
4. Ends up answering none satisfactory. 

 I remember being in journalism classes back in the day, when the rule was "if you want an answer, ask one direct question at a time." And to make it more fun, the question couldn't be answered with "yes" or "no." 

When you're conducting user research, or even trying to get to the bottom of an issue in a meeting, just ask one question at a time! And just ask the question: don't add fluffery, don't hedge and don't include your reasons for asking. You have a right to the answer to your question, so make your question easier to answer.

By the way, after you ask your question don't jump in to fill the uncomfortable silence (if any). The person is probably thinking. Thinking can cause answers. 

Update on 2011-01-19 02:49 by JMY

UX Matters just published a quality article about developing your interviewing skills. Great refresher!