User Journey Mapping

Chapter 3: Conducting User Research

In Chapter 1 of this book, we covered what user journey maps are and why they’re beneficial. In Chapter 2, we looked at the different kinds of maps you could build—from current journey maps to disaster maps, future state maps, and everything in between.

To build these maps, you need to collect data on your users. This is what’s called user research. It’s the discipline that focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations. If you skip user research, you’ll only be able to build hypothetical discovery maps. These can be a handy place to start for brainstorming purposes, but you can’t build better products if you don’t understand real needs, tasks and pain points. I can’t emphasize this enough: ...