“If you’ve been in the field of user experience design, usability testing, or marketing for any time at all, you’ve almost certainly come across the use of personas to help members of a cross-functional design team communicate with one another about the impacts that design decisions will have on a particular user demographic.” (Howard, 2014, p.10)
I come from a background of corporate learning, specifically product (software) training. The technology I want to focus on for my Week 2 Content Curation assignment is Journey Mapping tools. Some examples include Ethnographic Insight, Crazy Egg, Clicktale and/or MouseStats. These tools create “heat maps” and “session recordings” to record how customers interact with software; thereby, creating a user profile/learning profile for them.
The Dilbert comic featured above (Scott Adams), shows an example of badly designed software. In an ideal world, no software is designed badly intentionally. Therefore, the data gathered from mapping out learner’s journeys can find errors or glitches in the product, or track trends and be able to design the content better and develop training to help.
As for the classroom, in the age of technology, I imagine we will continue to introduce more and more tools for students to interact with, understanding and reviewing their journey through the tools will be helpful to create personalized learning for students. In the meantime, it is interesting to note that in many of the Software Terms of Conditions that we agree to without reading, there is a section regarding tracking us as we use the software and creates a user journey/experience profile for us.
Works Cited
Howard, T. (2014). Journey mapping: A brief overview. Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2(3), 10-13. doi:10.1145/2644448.2644451
You raise three interesting points about data-driven journey mapping here that are sometimes at odds with one another.
1. Personas. What are they good for? They might help a design group create empathy within the team for one or more demographics, but those characteristics (e.g. age, race, education, employment) are not indicative of a person’s behaviours or predict that a person will do something on a website.
2. Journey Mapping. Heat maps indicating user interactions with a site are more useful indicators of behaviour. They do not say anything about how a person likes or dislikes their experience, but the data can be used to improve user experience on the site by helping to simplify the flow of activities, or Jobs to Be Done. Value is created for a person when the site helps them accomplish what they are trying to get done. Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done” is nicely outlined by Clayton M. Christensen in Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done).
3. Personalized Learning: Is using learning analytics to understand student behaviours and to offer recommendations in a learning path the same as journey mapping? The path is often a deliberate linking of pre-and-post-requisite learning objectives that support the learning of a captive audience at the point of entry and where students struggle or master an objective. Your review makes me want to think further on the topic.
Hi Ben, this is a great comment, and I think I can always do more research to create a stronger connection between these terms.
However I would love to clarify, and answer your questions.
Firstly, I have been reading a book called “The Content Advantage” by Colleen Jones, which describes the role of personas very well. She states that “ideally, you will have a journey map for each persona or customer type” (p.54). Perhaps it is a stretch, but in my field, my learners are my company’s customers. Therefore, having an understanding of all the roles of my customers, how they access the content, and what they may need to be trained on next, is crucial for the success of the mobile training.
Now that I have connected Journey Mapping to personas, I want to elaborate that the tools that allow for tracking of the learner’s/customer’s journey is crucial to understanding the customer and their needs. It is also a way to track items that need updating, based on the analytics and whether the content is seen as valuable, effective, and relevant.
Lastly, you’re right, I am connecting journey mapping as a way to personalize a learner’s/customers journey. By understanding the customer/learner better, and creating in-depth personas, as instructional designers, and using the appropriate tools, I am able to recommend further training to that learner based on their needs.
Hi Emma
I love your idea of mapping the learning journey for the audience and participants to follow and monitor their learning experience. It would give them better ideas of positions in the whole learning journey and also helps them to keep a macro view. With increasing mobile technologies, interactions are becoming more limited to human-machine, which might not contribute to a friendly education environment.
I worked as an in-house trainer years ago. We tried to draw our own learning journey manually. With big data support, I believe data-driven journey mapping would make it easier and more effective.
Hi Nini, thank you for your comment! Data-driven journeys are something that has always interested me, both as a learner and trainer. I love being able to see the big picture, especially when, we can get so overwhelmed with the daily minutiae of the learning. It is good to see the larger scope so that we can see our successes, and create next steps.