Interaction Design Reflections: User Journeys

Storyboards as a User Journey communication tool

A User Journey is a way to tell a story from beginning to end for some goal a user has with relation to an application. The key to using a Storyboard to do this is showing progression with some degree of context and indicate subject’s emotion along the way.

The Takeaway

Challenges

Deliberate storyboarding is completely new to me, so naturally I ran into a few challenges:

Not enough time to build proficiency with proto.io

So I’ve been ultra-busy at work in recent weeks cleaning up some technical debt (that I’m entirely responsible for) and not fall too far behind sprint commitments. I didn’t get a chance to look at the assignment list until Friday night.

Behold, a new thing to learn!

It’s probably my fault for trying to run the thing in Safari, but its interactions take some getting used to. After fighting with the canvas for about fifteen minutes to build a single screen, I realized how much time I was losing and fired up Sketch.

Staying on target was challenging

I did a wireframing exercise last week for an app I’m working on which moved sequentially through a series of very high-level workflows. Kind of a storyboard minus the explicit narrative.

Had a tough time trying to keep that mindset from bleeding into this work. At each step, I had to ask myself:

Self? Does this particular element actually contribute to the narrative or is it superfluous?

Hi Self, me again. Is someone who doesn’t know the app going to have any clue how they got from the last frame to this one?

Still not convinced that I did it exactly right. Guess I’ll find out when the grade comes back!

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