How Mobile Ethnography Can Support Your Journey Map Creation Process
Introduction
With the present-day digital transformation continuing at pace, organizations are starting to build out journeys for digital experiences and are increasingly looking for tools to conduct these sessions remotely.
Co-creating journey maps is becoming a workflow staple for both product and service discovery phases; and Mobile Ethnography (also known as online or digital ethnography) is a solution that can expedite the creation of journey maps while capturing a wide gamut of valuable insights and details.
This article will walk you step-by-step on how to take your co-creation of the journey mapping process to the next-level by leveraging the power of mobile ethnography:
Defining Scope and Participant Recruitment:
Once you have identified your persona and scoped out the high-level stages for the journey, it’s time to recruit participants. In traditional Co-creation Journey mapping meetings, you would determine the participants, set aside time, and reserve a location to hold the co-creation session.
Mobile ethnography serves to untether the research from having to gather all participants in one location at one time. With subject matter experts (SMEs) and key stakeholders usually pressed for time, asynchronous workflows make it easy to get participation that accommodates numerous schedules.
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2. Validation of Journey Stages and Discovery of Steps:
Now that you have all your participants recruited and onboarded to the project, it’s time to validate the high-level journey stages followed by providing detailed steps for each stage of the journey. It’s important that each participant shares their knowledge so that it can be properly represented within the journey. One commonly observed pain point during this stage is how some participants tend to dominate the conversation while others sit quietly, holding onto key information. While some group dynamics are easier to moderate than others, follow-up sessions with individual participants are often needed to refine and clarify information from the group session.
Mobile ethnography allows researchers to sidestep group moderation and jump directly into data gathering. While time may be spent up-front to craft questions for validation and content gathering, each participant can be tasked with their own set of questions. This allows each participant to expand on their area of expertise, providing valuable insights that may be challenging to capture in a group workshop setting.
3. Creation and Iteration of the Journey Map:
With all the participants’ data gathered, it’s time to plot it into the journey. During this phase, it’s best to map out the journey in low-fidelity within a tool that allows for easy refinement. While some information will fit nicely into the journey stages, it’s not uncommon to have contradictions. This preliminary journey map will help you uncover gaps in workflows as well as additional stakeholders. Once these knowledge gaps are identified, it’s time to circle back with participants for clarification, additional data, and emotional phases.
Features such as transcribing, tagging, tasking make the data gathering process in mobile ethnography a convenient one. The filtering capabilities will be helpful when looking for specific data and details to pull into the journey. The ability to capture the user's emotion using CSAT or NPS score can be quickly aggregated and plotted onto the journey map. When conflicting information or workflow gaps are uncovered, it’s easy to follow up while referencing the content needed for expansion or validation.
4. Align and Refine Stage:
Once you have the journey mapped out with the additional information you gathered and all necessary iterations made, it’s a good idea to share the full journey draft with all the participants. This part of the journey can be useful to help participants decompartmentalize if they have been siloed.
This will also give them an opportunity to comment on how well their workflow fits into the full context of the journey. At this phase, there shouldn’t be large surprises, but it’s typical for small discrepancies to surface.
With Mobile ethnography, the journey can be shared out electronically with each participant tasked to review the deliverable and provide feedback. This process can help capture more details by having the participant record a video of their reaction while walking through the journey draft. Capturing the facial expressions, tone of voice, and detailed feedback will all be useful for refining the journey content.
5. Final Journey Creation and Wrapup:
At this phase, it’s time to plug the validated content into the final, high-fidelity journey format.
Typically, a high-fidelity template for the journey will be populated and scaled for the information gathered. Once you have the final journey, it’s best practice to take some time to document key findings. While some organizations may expect a presentation, others prefer a document of the core findings. Finally, is it necessary to organize and archive the data collected including videos, photos, transcripts, and any other artifact relevant to the journey map.
Once again, Mobile ethnography saves you time by archiving and organizing artifacts as you gather data. All interview recordings, transcriptions, emotional states, and qualitative survey data are neatly organized within the project. This makes it easy to share the project and reference the materials later on.
Summary
Journey maps are great tools for aligning teams on the customer and user workflows within focused context. Taking a co-creation approach to journey mapping ensures that the deliverable accurately captures the core user journey, including pain points and opportunities. While human interaction is still at the core of co-creation, mobile ethnography can help take the process to the next level at every step. By learning how to leverage this tool with your current research, you can save time and money without sacrificing the quality of the final deliverable.
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