A Detour to Personas and Journeys
So I might have gotten a little ahead of myself. I meant this post to be about story mapping the job board application. When I sat down to do that, I realized I left off a couple of other steps that should/could to be done prior to creating a Story Map.
- Determining who are our users
- Creating a user journey
Guidance from UX Design
These are both concepts I learned on my last project. I had the pleasure of working with a UX developer and started reading more about UX design. One of the ideas I found really helpful was creating personas to flesh out potential users. Then you use the personas to help craft that user’s journey through your application. Once you have enough journeys you examine them and determine the larger activities and tasks that these users may do as they interact with your application.
User vs. Customer When working on this post I became confused because there is so much information on creating User Journeys and on creating Customer Journeys. I am going to use the word user in this case because I’m not asking anyone to spend money. This job board is free.
Crafting Some Personas
Creating great personas is a discipline onto itself and generally requires teamwork and help from marketing or business analysts. You should gather data and demographics and try to put yourself in other people’s shoes. You then create persona cards that can have everything from biographical info, goals, social media accounts and basically anything else you can think of to make them more real.
Being a team of one and trying to keep things simple, I’ve created two personas: Ken, our job seeker, and Sarah a hiring manager.
I didn’t go into a lot of details on their background or personalities, but I think it’s enough to help drive out what the job board needs to do.
Mapping a User’s Journey
Now that we have some personas, we can map out their respective journeys. Again, there is a lot to do here in order to do it right. I found several different examples on how to map a journey. Several involve mapping the user not only using an application, but what they are doing and feeling before and after using it. I really like this idea because it focuses on outcomes for the user and those outcomes generally happen in the real world. However, I kept it simple again and just focused on the journey through the job board. These journeys are not very complex and are too simple for a real world job board, but I think they will serve my purpose for now.
Ken’s journey starts with seeing a list of job postings that he can search. If he finds one that’s interesting he can view the complete post and choose to apply. Only then does he need to login (and register if it’s his first time).
Sarah’s journey starts at the same place, but she needs to login before doing anything useful (from her person’s perspective). Once logged in she can post new jobs or manage existing ones. She can also see who has been applying and recruit them.
Now with these personas and user journeys maybe its time to start flushing out some stories.
References and Tools
These are some links I referenced when learning more about Personas and Journeys.
These links are the tools I used to bring things together
- AvatarMaker - I just kept hitting random until Ken and Sarah appeared.
- Name Generator - In a similar vein I just kept generating names until I found ones that fit.
- Inkscape - For SVG editing
- LucidChart - For laying out the cards and the journeys.