Document and visualize

Last updated on September 21, 2022

Visualize your research findings and design to create common understanding with the team and stakeholders.

On this page: 


Represent your users

Empathy map

Empathy maps visualize users' emotions and feelings related to a particular service or experience. Empathy maps help to synthesize your research into a consolidated format of what a user thinks, feels, says and does during a specific service. Understanding the emotional aspects of your users can better inform their needs in relation to your service. Empathy maps can also be used to develop personas.

 

Empathy map steps

  1. Print out the Empathy Map template or make a quadrant on a whiteboard
  2. Label the quadrants with the following titles: Say; Do; Think; Feel.
    • SAY: What are some quotes and defining words your user said? 
    • DO: What actions and behaviours did you notice? 
    • THINK: What might your user be thinking? What does this tell you about his or her beliefs?
    • FEEL: What emotions might your subject be feeling? 
  3. You can also create sections for “Pains” and “Gains” at the bottom of the quadrant.
  4. Populate the quadrants with the matching research data using all your research
  5. Identify user needs or insights based on the mapped emotions

Tips:

  • You can adjust the map to fit your particular research needs. For example, you can include “Hear” as an element to map if you’re designing a service in a physical space. 
  • Separate empathy maps should be created for each user segment or persona

Persona

A persona is a profile of a fictitious user based on behavioural research. Personas are not demographic segments, rather they describe particular groups of users based on similar:

  • Goals
  • Motivations
  • Behaviour

Personas help ground design decisions in user needs based on each group.

 

Persona steps

  1. Conduct qualitative research such as behavioural interviews, diary studies, or other field research methods to gain a deep understanding of users
  2. Use affinity mapping to group common elements and identify patterns about motivations, aspirations, goals, activities, outcomes, and background for individuals
  3. Identify different user profiles based on the behavioural patterns
  4. Print the persona template (PPT, 38KB)
  5. Fill in the details of the persona with behavioural patterns
  6. Add a photo and personal details to bring the persona to life

Tips:

  • Your team will likely create a set of different personas to express different behavioural profiles
  • Connect your personas to your research data to avoid the creation of stereotypes

Mental model

A mental model diagram shows the activities of a service broken down into specific user tasks. These are then aligned with the features and content that support the completion of the task. Mental models ground feature discussions in actual user needs and help create a roadmap and prioritization by showing what user tasks are well supported and which tasks have little or no support.

 

Mental model steps

  1. Conduct behavioural interviews that focus on a specific service area with defined tasks. Record and transcribe the interviews

  2. Analyze transcripts by pulling out specific activities, tasks, actions, and quotes

  3. Cluster actions into similar groups using sticky notes

  4. Determine related groups of tasks

  5. Arrange the tasks into columns, and then group the columns into similar activities

  6. Align features or content from your digital application or service with the relevant tasks (how does your site or service support the set of tasks that people need to do in this domain?)

  7. Identify the gaps in how your digital application or service supports user tasks and discuss what opportunities exist to improve

Additional resources

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior by Indi Young


Document the service

Journey map

A journey map shows the overall experience of a person engaging in a service. It illustrates the sequence of events and shows specific interactions in specific channels such as the web, phone, or in-person. By showing the sequence and details of the overall experience, teams can look for specific areas that need improvement. Journey maps are also useful for introducing executives, new team members or other collaborators to the scale and scope of a project.

 

Journey map steps

  1. Decide on a key journey or situation that your users engage in with your service. Your service may have multiple journeys that can be mapped
  2. Break the journey down into major phases
  3. Identify the key steps within each phase
  4. For each step, use dedicated rows to add detail such as:
    • Actions or Tasks: what are the specific things someone does during this step? 

    • Tools or Channels: how do they perform a task? What tools do they use (like a mobile phone, a web app or a paper form?) and what channels support those tools?
    • Thinking: what would the citizen think at this stage?
    • Feeling: how would the citizen feel at this stage? How stressed are they?
    • Needs at that stage of the service journey: What are specific needs, goals, or motivations at this point in the service journey? What would need to happen for the overall journey and the specific stage to be successful for the citizen?

Service blueprint

A service blueprint documents the overall journey with layers of information that detail what the organization must do to support that journey. Blueprints bring clarity to how the service functions by visualizing the connections from the front stage activities, what the citizen sees, and the backstage activities, what the citizen doesn’t see.

 

Service blueprint steps

  1. Start with a large roll of paper on the wall
  2. Divide the paper with three horizontal lines:
    • Label the first line as “The line of interaction”: This represents the point of interaction between the citizen and your service.
    • Label the second line as “The line of visibility:” This represents the areas of the service that the citizen can no longer see into the service processes.
    • Label the third line as “The line of internal interaction”: This represents where the service ends from your business area and were it might connect to third parties or other supporting services areas in government.
  3. Create 5 swim lanes in between these lines:
    • Service Evidence: The physical things that citizens will interact with to use your service. This could include forms, signage, websites, etc. anything that citizens or staff will see.
    • Activities: The activities and actions that citizens will do to interact with your service.
    • Frontstage: All the activities, things and processes that a citizen can see about your service.
    • Backstage: All the processes required to make your service function that a citizen doesn’t see.
    • 3rd Parties: These are the processes outside your service area from partners or other areas of government that support the service. This is labelled below the line of internal interaction.
  4. Fill in the different swim lanes with the components of your service and connect them with lines to show their relationship.
  5. If you discover areas that you aren’t sure of, this can be a good indication that more research should be done in that area to understand the full extent of the service process. 

Plan the future

Service roadmap

A service roadmap shows a high-level timeline for implementing the organizational capabilities required to deliver a service. The roadmap shows the organizational activities and capabilities, and aligns them by when the organization is able to implement them. These capabilities and activities also document the value that they deliver in order to maintain the vision of the service.

 

Service roadmap steps

  1. Review any blueprints the team may have created
  2. Use sticky notes to sort the blueprint capabilities and organizational activities into related clusters
  3. Create streams or swim lanes of the types of effort needed, such as:
    • Client Interface
    • Operations and Processes
    • Policy and Legislation
    • Organizational Staffing and Structure
    • Technical Systems
  4. Organize the clusters in the related swim lanes based on:
    • Overall timeframe of the project (use years as the Roadmap timeline—Year One, Year Two, Year Three; paired with more relative timing—Now, Soon, Later, Someday.)
    • Dependencies (what things need to come before other things)
    • Connections to other ministry or government projects and capabilities
    • High-level estimates of resources, time, talent or budget needed
    • The capacity of the organization
    • Value of the individual investments
  5. Refine the roadmap into a polished infographic that can be printed at a large scale and hung up in an office space