As an enthusiast of Software Development, I imagine that You have already been exposed to the term 'Personas' before in the context of a User Centered Design discussion. In this article I intend to explain what 'User Journeys' are, how to create them, and why they are more appropriate for use in an enterprise Corporate Intranet design context than Personas are.
Before I can do that; however, I must explain briefly what personas are and what they're used for in the domain of Internet based software and web design. A persona is like a realistic profile of fictitious individual used to define a certain target audience segment. In public-facing web sites used for establishing brand identity, product placement and the user experience of on-line retail sales, Personas are very helpful in defining several target audiences for the purpose of insuring that we (the development team) are not streamlining for one target audience at the expense of another. The concept is that there are multiple User Types and each should be considered with equal reverence during the course of your design efforts. One man's pain point may be another man's UI shortcut or treasure, Let me illustrate by way of example...
I once worked for a retail auto sales web site where (yes, you are taking advice from a used car salesman here) we had developed four personas to help them define the sometimes transient user types and identify more correctly with the UX desires of each individual target audience segment. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but basically We had an 'Expert Edward,' 'Particular Paula,' 'Frugal Frank,' and 'Trade-off Tamara.' Each one a full-blown personality profile describing them to a 'T' right down to their imaginary photograph, personality collage, and undergarment preferences. Ed was the type who would read-up on the facts and stats of every auto make and model before making a decision as to which one to buy, Paula was the type who wants a BMW because all of her friends drive a BMW, Frank was the type for whom saving money is paramount - and he just wants a vehicle to "get him from point 'a' to point 'b' " - with no regard for what brand or how fancy it is, and Tamara was the kind of customer who wants a Cadillac but can only afford a Camry, so she would be thrilled to settle for something a little more than she can afford but less that she expected.
Wow!, that's starting to get personal, isn't it? It's a whole lot of information intended to help us understand more about people who may potentially buy our products. But let's say were not selling any products. Let's say we're trying to organize data on a huge Intranet with a difficult to use interface and a pretty much captive audience. They have to use it because they work there, and they often have a difficult time trying to find the data that they're looking for in this gigantic mess of unplanned and often viral growth we call the Intranet. Something like Personas might help us identify with the needs of this target audience as well, but are 'Personas' the right fit? - Not So Much (TMI? perhaps) Instead of full-blown personality profiles and fictitious Franks, our Corporate Intranet design could benefit a lot more from an exercise commonly known as 'User Journey Optimization.'
To create effective 'User Journeys,' We must first identify several roles, user classes, or 'User Types' that must use this system to perform their routine tasks on a regular basis. Next we must write a brief 'back-story' for each User Type, not un-similar to the User Stories made so popular on the scrum field of Agile Development. These are purely fictitious like the 'Personas' used in public web site design; however, they are written with the intent of testing a business case (or several) around a specific type of User's daily Journey through our software. We do this to poke holes in, and / or validate, the project team's preconceived notions* may have about what the Users want and expect out of the software we are building.
(*=our team-mates and development stakeholders' baggage they bring into the project assuming 'this is how it should be')
Rather than the Carol, Ted, Bob, & Alice of Persona-land, we are looking for the corp. intranet User types like 'Sam, a project manager, needs to post an update to the project schedule,' 'Dianne, a Departmental Business Lead, needs to go into the 'Project Central' team site and generate a report to show her boss on the status of the TPS projected vs. actuals,' and 'Rob, a Site Owner/Admin needs to add some photos and text to the internal news articles on his department's Home page.'
We still go with names and a wee bit of fictitious storyline to help make the characters seem more real to the team, but the intent here is much more down to earth. I am not beating the drum of splendid ad copy to loudly proclaim 'I am so great,' - Instead I am hoping to instill each member of my development team with a bit of quietly inspired brilliance that will carry them through a strenuous 'imagineering' process. We will ask questions like "Who are the Users," What is the Content," and "How will they access that content on a daily basis?" We will draw diagrams illustrating pods within the Corporation's universe of data in a big circle know as the 'environment' - we will draw leaves and nodes, draw stick figures around the circle representing each User Type, and map them to the data they typically need to access on a daily basis - and in doing do -as a pleasant but nearly 'free' by-product - we will begin to define that all-important 'User Task Analysis' which is often so hard to get started on or quantify.
Why do we do all this? It's because Better Usability can only be achieved by carefully addressing the qualitative User Experience, and because flaws in that experience can only be measured and corrected if we can translate the User's qualitative pain points into quantitative trends and design patterns that we can prioritize, anticipate, compensate for, and re-design the site structure, global navigation, and User Flows against.
So what is a User Journey? - It's typically a presentation containing a series of visual aids Defining Users, Actors, and Content, with 'The session Leader' taking a few moments to walk his stakeholders, SMEs, and developers through 'a day in the life' of our Users, illustrating them being engaged in one of the systems-based processes that we are here to design functionality for - sharing diagrams like process flows & page flows with the emphasis on the User and her tasks: showing how she logs in, navigates to her workspace, and posts a slide show of the recent off-site team bonding exercise at the local cafe, goes to her in-box to check for recent alerts & notifications, checks her task list, uses her ATM card to withdraw $20 from her account, and uses those funds to order a Philly cheese for lunch [or a cheeseburger without getting a hamburger by mistake because she fat-fingered it and clicked the wrong button by mistake] at the company cafeteria website...all the while feeling happy because her dashboard is clean and her in-box is empty...what a wonderful Corporate Intranet world we can illustrate if we only know how to properly recognize the design patterns and Design the better User eXperience.
Good eXperience Design: It's like the wholesomeness of Wonderbread, it's 'baked in by design.'