Stage 1 - Learn: Design and Discovery

The product discovery process is a fundamental step to help us understand who are we designing for and what the best solutions are to solve our challenges.

Persona Mapping

Persona mapping is a collaborative tool that involves the creation of fictional, but realistic profiles of our target users. They reflect characteristics like personal attributes, goals, motivations, attitudes and more. It helps us understand who we are designing for and why. It can also assist with determining ways we can help different users and deliver real value and meaning. Persona Mapping can overlay with Empathy Mapping to create extended user profiles.

Empathy Mapping

An empathy map is a collaborative tool that we can use to gain a deeper insight into people using a product. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment. It can help us better understand and relate to a user. Insights can involve context, feelings, preferences, wants, needs and opportunities to help users. It helps define what a particular user might do, see, think and feel. Empathy mapping can overlay with Persona Mapping to create a rich user profile.

Journey Mapping

A journey map is a collaborative and holistic tool that helps visualise a process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In its most basic form, journey mapping starts by compiling a series of user actions into a timeline. Next, the timeline is fleshed out with user thoughts and emotions in order to create a user narrative. As above this mapping tool can be used in conjunction with persona and empathy mapping to create rich insights and highlights items such as opportunities to add value to users, areas for change and improvement, user flows, defining touch-points and moments to alleviate pain points. Ultimately the aim of a user journey map is to create a better experience for users of a product.

Explore Catalpa's template for Journey Mapping