An Intro to Journey Building
UX Research, Alloy x Plot Twisters
Question
How might we create tools to empower people to build the journey of their life?
Responsibilities
Conduct interviews to explore people’s habits, behaviors, and life styles
Distill interview Insights into actionable insights to using a thematic analysis approach
Lead an ethnography study to understand how existing tools are used & identify competitor’s strengths & use value
I worked on the discovery phase of the project to discover people’s motivations for self-reflection by conducting interviews & ethnography studies.
Duration
September 2020 - Present
Team
Me, Jenny Liu Zhang, Karla Leung, Amanda Curtis, Caitlyn Chang, & Joanna Shan
Context
What is journey building?
Journey building is the activity of self-reflection that allows you to create & analyze patterns in your life to make decisions for the future. The journey builder is the set of tools that will allow someone to engage in self-reflection and create their journey.
Methods
Ethnography
Competitive Analysis
1:1 Interviews
Psychographics
Method One
Ethnography & Competitive Analysis
Ethnography
Discovery Phase
Since we were just starting to create this journey builder tool our team set out to discover how people were using existing tools to reflect on their habits, life patterns, and more. Our research team began to conduct an ethnography approach in the context of market research/competitive analysis to better understand our users. This could help us identify frustration points people face with these existing tools.
Competitive Analysis
Market Research Phase
The first version of our journey builder prototype (shown below) prompted us to conduct research on the functions and interactions of our tools. We conducted market research to analyze the competitive landscape and discover existing tools that performed some of the tasks we wanted our journey builder to do. These included:
Notion
Are.na
Roam
First Journey Builder Prototype
Competitor #1 Notion HQ
I looked through Notion reddit threads, articles, and Facebook groups to understand how people were engaging with Notion as a journaling, self-reflection and life management tool.
To come up with possible use cases for each platform/tool, we evaluated each
using the following criteria:
values it offers
what people use it for
pros & cons
features to incorporate into our own tools
3 Notion use cases:
An emotions and habits tracker (image shown is a tracker created by Notion influencer Marie Poulin)
A wiki/home page to manage areas of life
A drawing integration within Notion
Method Two
1:1 Interviews
Once we identified these use cases, I conducted 2 rounds of 1:1 interviews to dig deeper into the ways people used journaling and other self-reflection tools we hadn't included in our competitive analysis. We wanted to have conversations about self-reflection and their perspective on the concept of "journey building".
Round One of Interviews
I interviewed a total of 6 participants. This included students on a gap year, teachers, and mentors. For this round we reached out to people who were interested in education, self-reflection, mentoring, or teaching. These were done virtually through zoom and were semi-structured and mostly bluesky conversations about the role of self-reflection in education
Participants
Demographic Info
Students, teachers, and mentors interested in education, self-reflection, mentoring, teaching, or journaling.
I interviewed 6 people TOTAL due to time constraints.
Topic of first cohort interviews
Goal: collect feedback on how teachers, students and mentors perceive the role of reflection and journey building in K-12 education.
Second cohort interviews
Goal: uncover behaviors that people engaged in & what tolls they use to reflect on their life
Interview Questions Round 1
Quotes from Interviews Round 1
“I see this journey builder as a collection of visual or physical artifacts about stages in our life.”
— Trent
“We all bring knowledge and experiences relevant to the classroom. It’s not just the person who’s in a prescribed teaching position that can teach.”
— Adriana
“I think about a journey builder as storytelling, documenting, and collecting things as you go”
— Mira
Research Questions for Round 2
Is there a need for people to use a tool that addresses self-reflection/journey building?
If there's a need, what are their current self-reflection habits/tools of choice?? how do they keep track of goals? Do they bullet journal? do they store it digitally or physically?
What are their frustrations with current self-reflection methods/ tools? what do they not like about journaling tools?
Interview Questions Round 2
Coding Interviews/Themes
These are the codes our team came up with to code all our interviews and create themes
Quotes from Interviews
"I've always used a planner. But generic ones don't fit my needs. I can't customize them. I chose bullet journaling as a way to reflect because its so customizable and I can use my creativity for it."
— Participant A
"Rather than keeping a journal to document everyday things, I "keep a dream journal and write down my dreams every morning as soon as I wake up. Sometimes it depends on the intensity of the dream because dreams are an important part of my life."
— Participant B
"I use sticky notes and the iPhone notes app a lot to document things. If I feel a strong burst of emotion I'll put it down into my notes app."
— Participant C
Deliverable: Personas
Based on the interviews we created personas for the types of people that could use our journey building tools. These are still being updated to better reflect our target audience!
Trent, Mentor
Adriana, Teacher
Mira, Student
Method Three
Psychographics
We grouped people from both rounds of interviews based on specific characteristics that could affect what self-reflection tools look like. Rather than fictional personas, we chose psychographics dive deeper into their characteristics, behaviors, habits, and lifestyles.
Created psychographics specifically including information about lifestyles and life values of each person to determine how the journey builder tool would fit into their routine
Made a graph with two axes to take into account whether individuals are past, present or future-oriented and whether they reflect individually or with others
Mapped personas on this grid to understand the types of users we were speaking to and form cluster groups
Mapped interviewees on a grid
Through this exercise we….
Got a better idea of how to cluster personas into groups based on behaviors and life habits
Identified target users we were missing
Asked ourselves, “what are other habits people have when reflecting?”
Moving Forward
We still have more to learn from people’s self-reflection habits and how they use journaling, note taking, and task management tools in everyday life. Furthermore, these are our next steps:
Figure out what types of interfaces are crucial for creating a story
Discover how journaling can be integrated into our tools
Brainstorm how people will interact with reflection tools and use them to build their journeys
Improving recruiting participants by narrowing down what types of habits we want to focus on: do we focus on those who are actively engaging with self-reflection? or the opposite?
Learnings 🌟
How to present deliverables
Condensing interviews into digestible presentation is important when communicating findings with the team
Quality over Quantity
We conducted a deep qualitative research method, semi-structured interviews. By doing 6 interviews instead of 10+ we distilled insights about lifestyle, habits, and more.
Working with Constraints
Time and budget were constraints. As a startup that has not officially launched we do not have the financial bandwidth to compensate interviewees. Adaptability and flexibility for success in research