Try This: The Journey Map

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2017-05-10T11:28:02-04:00May 10th, 2017|Categories: Miscellaneous|Tags: Design Thinking, Human Centered Design, Try This|0 Comments

Last month, I introduced design thinking, a process many nonprofits and community groups are using to generate engagement with communities. Empathy is the first step in the process, and the user persona is an outcome we can use to develop programs and services for the ideal communities we want to reach.

Today, let’s focus on the second step in the design thinking process: Define.

After creating a user persona based on the empathy interviews and observation we’ve conducted, we begin to define the problem we want to solve, based on the insights of the intended user. Let’s do this by creating a Journey Map.

The goal of a Journey Map is to give a holistic view of what a stakeholder is going through from their point of view. In the case of creating a program or service, having a variety of stakeholders (a potential program participant, a program facilitator, and the program manager, for example) can yield insights into how a program may work from various perspectives.

Here’s what you need:

A stack of large Post-It notes in one color
Two smaller stacks of Post-It notes in two different colors
Some Sharpie markers
White butcher paper (or a clean white board wide enough for multiple Post-Its)

The steps:

Let’s go back to the user persona we created:

This example is “Nicole”, a nonprofit worker that works at a nonprofit that provides services for formally incarcerated women. She wants to create an awareness campaign that teaches formally incarcerated women about the Reproductive Justice framework and teaches advocacy skills to help formally incarcerated women advocate for accessible reproductive healthcare, both during incarceration and during the transition process. Nicole has now been given the OK to create the program from the executive director. Now, she can work on introducing the RJ framework to staff to generate buy-in for the program and campaign.

Each person get a stack of large Post-Its and 2 stacks of smaller Post-Its (each in different colors) and a Sharpie. The larger Post-Its will be the steps, and the smaller Post-Its will be the “pain points”.

Next, have each participant map out the process of creating this program from their perspective. For this example, let’s have Nicole create her journey map by mapping out her ideal steps needed to create a Reproductive Justice 101 presentation for staff and steps needed to recruit staff to help develop the program and campaign.

Using the large Post-It notes, Nicole creates the following steps and places them on the butcher paper:

(more…)

How to Authentically Engage for Lasting Impact

If you want to authentically engage and make a lasting impact, you need to get at the heart of a person’s lived experience.

This is the heart of the design thinking process. This process has been used by businesses for who knows how long, and anyone–social workers, educators, students and more–can use this process.

In fact, design thinking helped me fall back in love with the Reproductive Justice movement because I was rapidly burning out. I wanted another way to remain engaged in the movement, and wanted to reenter the movement from another angle. Being introduced to design thinking by CoreAlign and the American Evaluation Association a few years ago was the answer.

In short, design thinking (which came out of the Design School at Stanford University), is a structured approach to generating ideas by getting into the mind of of the audience you’re trying to reach.

We’re designers, in one form or another. Teachers develop class curricula based in district expectations and well as students’ learning styles. Social workers and others in the helping professions create evidence-based interventions that meet the needs of the populations they work with. Businesses create products based on user feedback. The best way to make something better is by going to the source.

Here’s the process:

The first step in the design thinking process is discovering why the audience does what they do, their physical and emotional needs, their worldview, and what’s meaningful to them. This is the most important step in the process because in order to create a solution, you must identify why finding a solution matters to them.

It’s having a conversation, and it moves people from being statistics to names and faces. Having conversations with the intended user and observing them in their environment allows you to see behaviors within the context of their lived experience. Insights from these conversations hones into what really matters from their perspective. Oftentimes, we think we know what the problems are, and we create programs, services, and initiatives that aren’t successful because the voices of the people we’re wanting to reach weren’t involved in the process.

I’ll go into depth of each part of the design thinking process later, but today we’re going to use a tool that allows you to to get at the heart of a person’s lived experience: The User Persona.