How can you avoid common mistakes when using personas and journey maps for UX research?

The first thing that comes to my mind is to have an inclusive user base. Talk with various people, from various contexts, with different backgrounds and constraints. Another is to balance different research methods - don't just base your decisions on findings from interviews - blend various qual and quant methods, and don't forget about analytics. In B2B consider various user roles - one person can have different journey than another. Also instead of personas we might think about using archetypes that are more actionable and help us actually remember some characteristics about our users. Talk with stakeholders who have direct contact with users and customers. They can bring some great perspectives to the talk 😊

An example I´ve seen in my working experience is that clients usually have lots of bias regarding their user's needs and frustrations, just because they didn´t confirm these "assumptions" with real users. I always recommend running workshops to analyze real data together with all the clients involved in the project. Some workshop dynamic always runs really well is to make surveys and interviews to real end users with open questions (based on their last experience) and make diagram mapping with these real insights. You will end with a visual "map" and you will see what are the most common frustrations and motivations. The clients always find out new things they didn´t realize before with this dynamic.

I think everyone would agree that the best persona and user journeys are based on evidence. The challenge is finding the time and budget to gather evidence, My suggestion is to first leverage what you have, secondary resources, app reviews, conversations, then look to validate insights you have low confidence in.

Imagine I am designing a food delivery app. A common mistake might be creating a persona like "Busy Professional" without thorough research. Instead, you conduct interviews and discover "Esha, the Working Mom," who values quick and healthy meal options. Your journey map might include her experience from ordering to delivery. To avoid neglecting negative scenarios, you consider a situation where Esha receives the wrong order and highlight opportunities to improve customer support and order accuracy. By following these guidelines and adapting them to your specific project, you can create personas and journey maps that truly enhance your UX research and design process.

1- Don't have personas for the sake of having them, remember why. Personas help you understand differences in your user base, so that you can better define and match the value(s) of your product to your user base. Use their power of engaging 'any' stakeholder. Give them names, make them distinct, and enjoy hearing engineers to founders referring them. 2- Use an iterative approach. If you have 2 personas that seem different but use/need your product in the same way. Merge them back, they are the same persona! Iterate and see what other attributes can account for the different preferences, needs, values... continue until you can find profiles that your product can help differently. (ps. not every product has to have 1+ personas)

It's always helpful to keep in mind that a persona profile is representative of a "group" of users, and people are never exactly the same. More than often persona profiles could be merged together based on their shared attributes and some attributes could be defined as ranges instead of exact values.

If you are working in a B2B product space, understand the difference between buyers or customers, and end users. Often, all these groups have different motivations, goals, and behaviors. It is important to understand which of these personas are relevant to the context of the product depending on the goals of the research. Ex: - Motivations to buy a product? - Motivations to sustain investment in a product? - Motivations to adopt a product? - Motivations to continue using a product? - Motivat

I agree with the number of personas. Those should not be more that 3. However when it comes to detailing out the persona. I believe that a persona should largely consist of behavioural tendencies of the user, in regards with our product and in regards with regular life. I also believe that the persona should NOT have one image, one name and one job. You should create a persona like a moodpboard instead, with multiple images of people who could fit in this persona, the kind of jobs this person could have and the kind of behaviours you could expect from this persona. However, once you actually interview people you can optimise the personas as you go.

It's vital for product designers to differentiate between marketing's "target audience" and genuine UX personas. While the former outlines an aspirational demographic, UX personas should be rooted in authentic user research. Relying on a marketing-driven vision can lead designs towards an organization's idealized user, not the actual users. This is often seen in startups challenging established products, where market capture ambitions can blur genuine user-centric design. For authentic design, it's essential to base personas on direct user insights.

Persona Balance: Avoid too many or overly vague personas for effective UX research. Optimal Number: Limit personas to 3-5 to maintain focus and clarity. Detailed Personas: Create realistic, specific personas with names, photos, and stories. Humanize Users: Develop personas with relatable personalities, goals, pain points, and behaviors. Expertise: Emphasize the importance of personas that resonate with design teams and stakeholders. Targeted Design: Focused personas aid in prioritization and designing for key user groups. Real-World Empathy: Specific personas help teams empathize with users as real individuals.

In my opinion the context of the user has to be defined as a 3 sentence paragraph that should inform the journey mapping entirely. Sentence 1: What does the user want to achieve 2. Who and what are his influencers and triggers 3. What are the primary and secondary motivations/fear of the user type. This then becomes a great reference to see to it that the journey doesn’t feel generic in nature. I feel most of the time the emotions are quite useless in the journey mapping exercise, unless written well. Just writing emotion names like anger, frustration, joy just does not work. So the way I would write it is “The user feels a bit helpless and frustrated because of the lack of transparency”

Assess whether you are ready to build your journey maps by using a User Story template such as this one: "As a [user type], I want to [task to complete] so I can [outcome to be achieved]." If you can't fill in those details clearly and succinctly, more work needs to be done!

Context Awareness: Don't overlook user context and goals in journey maps. Holistic View: Journey maps capture user experiences across touchpoints and time. Crucial Insights: Understand user needs, emotions, and pain points at each stage. Consider Influencing Factors: Account for environment, mood, social situation, and past experiences. User-Centered Questions: Continuously ask why users take specific actions and what they aim to achieve. Insights: Experience emphasizes the significance of context-aware journey maps. Informed Design: Inclusive consideration leads to better-informed design decisions.

A unique and inclusive design approach to empathizing with stakeholders is, using non-human personas. If the design is affecting the environment and the ecosystem, giving a name, face and anthropomorphize it helps empathize with it more. This approach reduces unintended consequences and understanding the context better.

A common mistake is focusing on problems instead of needs and outcomes. When you focus on a problem at best you’ll make incremental improvements to the experience, and at worst you’ll end up “checking the box” on functionality. Outcomes focus your team on how the world will be better for your users by giving them something they need that they don’t have now.

While designing a product, I've always focussed on understanding user's needs, motivations, behaviours and their interaction & pain points with using technology. Discovering these aspects about users help us fall in love with their problems, empathize with their needs better instead of validating if they would use a certain feature or not. This helps us build those features from a human-centric perspective and makes room for more potential features to be built - for the users! This helps keep the users - heard & happy. On the other hand, drives more volume + revenue + market relevance for the product.

Problem-Centric Approach: Don't fixate on features; focus on users' problems. User-Centered Understanding: Begin with empathizing with user issues. Feature-Problem Alignment: Ensure solutions align with user needs and expectations. Iterative Process: Ideate and prototype solutions, refining them based on user feedback. Experience: Highlight the importance of a problem-solving mindset. Effective Design: Prioritizing problems leads to more user-centric and impactful solutions. User Feedback-Driven Iteration: Continuously refine solutions for better user experiences.

While this is a strategic pillar in persona design, it is also important to focus on the right problems. Often personas can incorporate a whole range of big, complex problems but project teams have to prioritise which ones must be solved right now vs what are future roadmap priorities basis urgency of a problem. In a nutshell, personas should highlight the biggest, salient user needs we can deliver to from the get go.

I would go as far as to say that we often forget to refer to and align our thinking, solution design and prototyping to personas that are created with much fanfare during discovery and kickoff design phase of a project. Creating a robust persona and journey can support the entire lifecycle of a project and it's important to align our design progress and validate it with our persona insights at every step.

Dynamic Nature: Don't treat personas and journey maps as static; they evolve. Continuous Validation: Regularly test them with users, stakeholders, or experts. Evolving Understanding: As UX research progresses, so should your personas and maps. Avoid Stagnation: Outdated information can lead to misguided design decisions. Incorporate New Insights: Adapt based on fresh data, feedback, or insights. Wisdom: Emphasize the importance of keeping personas and maps up to date. Effective Design Adaptation: Continual validation ensures designs stay aligned with user reality.

Be data driven and use mixed methods research to make sure the personas are not biased by qualitative data. The best is to use big data to understand different behaviour clusters and then enrich it with in-depth interviews with people from the different clusters and other quali methods as home visits, diaries, etc.

I feel that secondary research is extremely critical, however most people seem to just google things. Digital ethnography can be used very intelligently to truly understand your user and his/her motivations, fear and goals. To give you an example, I was doing some research for a furniture brand website in the past. I went to all the furniture market places online and check out their reviews on their most popular products. However I also looked for the most popular bedsheet on amazon and checked the questions asked and the reviews there. Because there were a ton of images people posted of their rooms and it was such an insightful find.