Building Bridges in UX: Personas, Journey Maps, and Empathy at Scale | Ep #40

Welcome to Here's My At Matters, a podcast to explore the situations we find ourselves in, and how we show up or don't, and why it matters. I'm your host, Theresa Washburn, and I'm thrilled to have you with us today. Whether you're a long time fan or a first-time listener, get ready to dive into what matters for you. And I'll give you a spoiler. It all matters, especially the things you don't think do. Before we jump into the topic today, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review if you enjoy what you hear. Your support means the world to us and helps, here's why it matters reach even more curious minds, just like yours. Okay, let's go. Get ready for some captivating conversation and inspiration. This is Here's Why It Matters. Welcome, Andrew Shaw. I'm so happy to host you on this week's episode of Here's Why It Matters. And I would love to just start with an introduction of you. Sure. Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I've been in the user experience industry for a long time. I've had a lot of different experiences over kind of 20 plus years in design and research and strategy. I'd say I consider myself definitely a researcher, I think just mostly because I'm just really curious. And I love the science and rigor behind what we do. And yeah, I mean, my career has taken different twists and turns from starting out in kind of the agency world where I got to work with a lot of great clients and just so much variety in the work. And at some point along the way, I went in-house to manage a design and research team. And at that point, I started to work more in the medical space, which really presented a lot of interesting challenges. The work was really rewarding. And I just thrived, kind of just like the complex ecosystem of our American medical system. But it really gave me appreciation for, I think that's really the inception of where my book came from, where I realized that things are much more complicated than they appear on the surface. So it's not just about good design or good UI or UX. It's the whole entire experience. And so when you're dealing with a hospital system, when I was working at Mayo Clinic, it was very much about supporting the patient when they're at home, when they're in the hospital, when they're critically ill in a hospital bed or getting chemotherapy. And there's so many scenarios that where technology is now seamlessly part of that experience, but it's trying to make sure that whatever we're doing actually looks at the bigger picture. So a lot of what I've done is really just contextualize the experience and making sure that we are considering every aspect, every touch point that that user experiences. Yeah, absolutely. And the touch points, and also it sounds like the cognitive load on the users who are using those systems to monitor life and death situations, right? And not all of our work is related to life and death, but as we're moving through our work, our days, like you said, it's a lot more complicated than it than it might seem. And that's why I love having you as a guest on here's why it matters because a lot of things matter that, you know, we don't always maybe connect the dots to seeing that they really matter and how they show up in other ways as we're moving through our work in our lives. Yeah, exactly. And it's also realizing that the experience takes a village, if you will. I mean, it's for the hospital, for example, it's everything from the person that greets you when you first get there when you're checking in to it, like an intake nurse and of course the physician and medical technicians and a pharmacist. And so when we look at kind of the whole rate of personas, that person is interacting with a lot of different people in their experience, not just the technology. And of course, there is the technology of the patient portal and their health record system and their insurance system and even just going online to learn about their condition. And so, and of course, you know, medical building, which is a fun one. There's so much as a patient where there's kind of a front end and back end of experience. And I say as a researcher, talking to patients, seeing them in their own environment, seeing where they live, seeing where they get care, it really builds a lot empathy and a lot of kind of context for the situations that they're in. Yeah. Yeah. When you think about your book and by the way, how can people get a hold of your book and let us know the title of it, you know, where it's available first. Let me let me touch on that first, but it's a title. Sure. Yeah. It's the persona and journey map playbook. And I really wanted to have a name that a playbook in the sense like it really gives you kind of the strategies and ways of working and ways of thinking and really try to look at persona's and journey maps in kind of a different way where in the past, they haven't always, they haven't always been the most successful artifacts in our field and UX. And so I'm hoping that the strategies in this book really help people to kind of think of things in a way and kind of empower them to actually kind of own the strategy wherever they work. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And when you think about like a journey map and how we might use that to bridge ourselves to the future, how do you think through that in your work and your personal life? How does it show up? Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's really a key there is it's grounding ourselves in understanding experience and the complexities, understanding your users, your personas, understanding their goals, which to me are really their journeys that they're on. And then we're recently I've been focusing on blueprints or often called service blueprints where it's marrying all those things together, the people process and technologies or capabilities. And so really understanding kind of that current state of things is really needed before we can start thinking about the future. And then I use the term building a bridge because that really is a way to then say, okay, what is that ideal experience we want to get to, which is kind of that other side of the metaphorical bridge? And that's great because we can have folks look at North Star visions and really look at where do I ultimately want to end up? What is that ideal future state look like? But how are we going to get there is look at these blueprints, personas and journeys because that's really kind of the structure of pillars of the bridge that kind of helps us understand, okay, what are the things we have to change and align on and invest in as that bridge is being built towards that future? So it's kind of helping to build that infrastructure. So we might have some really great aspirations, but this is kind of how we actually get there, how we get to that other side of the bridge. It sounds like there's also a piece of really understanding the gaps in the ravine, how deep the gap goes right and how big the gap is to build the bridge because if you don't understand what the gaps are, then it's hard to even understand what kind of bridge you need or can use. Yeah, for sure. And it kind of also depends sticking to the bridge analogies. It's how long the bridge is. Are you talking about something that you want to be able to accomplish in the next year? That's not too far a bridge to be cast into a cross, but maybe you're talking about something that's several years away or maybe even a decade away. I work with companies where some of them have really far future aspirations for what they want to do. They really didn't understand how to get there. So if it's kind of near a term, it's a little bit more predictable and you can kind of look at what your capabilities are today. You can look at your users as they are today and it's a little easier to then say, okay, here's how we're going to move incrementally across that bridge. But if you're talking about, especially the way technology is moving so fast today, I know, three years is now really long time when it comes to technology. And so trying to predict where that technology is going to go, what opportunities, but also challenges that's going to introduce is harder to predict. And also your users themselves are evolving very quickly. Our expectations are mental models of how we use technology, how it's integrated into our lives, how we even work with other people. It is fundamentally changing. So that bridge has to be a little flexible, like any good bridge is, to make sure it can flex as we learn more about those needs as technology changes. We can still get to where we want, but it may not necessarily be the same path we set out several years in the past. Yeah. I'm curious how this framework has shown up for you as a manager, maybe even in your personal life when you're thinking about your own personal goals and professional development. Have you had this framework in other ways? I think you definitely can. I think it's really compatible with any kind of goal setting, really. I mean, we all have aspirations, things we want to reach in terms of career success or personal success. And those could be like really long-ridden as perhaps. If you're early in your career, hopefully you have a great long career ahead of you. And you know, ideally what would love to be able to achieve. But it could be something much more short term. I mean, maybe it's your journey of owning your own home. Maybe you're looking to save up for it. Maybe you're hoping to do that in the next year or two. Your goals are much closer. That bridge is a lot shorter. So I kind of look at what I try to do that way too because being kind of pragmatic, I think, in terms of just how are you going to get there? One of those challenges. the head, leaving room for that bridge to be a little flexible, but kind of like slowly incrementally saying, okay, here's how I'm going to get there. And as a researcher, it's ingrained to me to use kind of data. So it's like, what do I know now? How am I going to track if I'm heading the right direction or not and trying to be very real as you're moving ahead? And sometimes it's not clear where you're ultimately trying to go. But a lot of times, if you don't have that line of sight, you're just sort of just along, you're kind of along for the ride at that point, which is not necessarily the best strategy. Yeah, and it sounds like there's some vulnerability here too, right? Like not knowing where you're going. It feels maybe a little scary to take the first step or the second or 10th step. When you think the path will be there, you think the bridge will be present. What if people take a misstep in this analogy of the bridge and building it in the wrong direction? I think missteps are totally okay. And I think that's natural. I think it's healthy. And I think we do learn from our mistakes. But I think the point is also even kind of recognizing it as kind of a misstep or not aligned to the bridge you're trying to build. I mean, if you kind of know the direction you're trying to hit in, then that should make it easier to recognize if something is in the right direction or not. And we're faced with decisions every day. And those decisions can help shape that bridge. And some of those might be small decisions, but some of them could really have a huge impact on whether you're heading in the right direction. And I actually meant to a lot of people who are early career and for me to help them, honestly, I'm trying to understand from their perspective what is the other side of the bridge that they want to get to. And a lot of people aren't really sure when they're presented with that. They kind of want to kind of explore. And I think that's great. But I think at the end of the day, you kind of want to have that line of sight to kind of know what you want to pursue. Because a lot of their bridges are long. They have a long, hopefully career ahead of them. There's a lot of choices to make. And there's a lot of investments they have to make to get all the way to the other side. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you think about even the name of this podcast here's why it matters. Like what matters about this work and how you're describing it? Yeah, I mean, I think it just it gives people hopefully feeling more empowered, I think, with, you know, whatever decisions they're trying to make. You know, and again, some of these decisions are complicated and not something that is going to happen overnight. And it gives them hopefully the ability to say, you know, I feel like I can do this. I feel like I can achieve it. I feel like I have a plan. The plan is not set in stone, but it kind of least gives me something to say, okay, I know I'm making progress because of these things that matter to me, you know, and those are those should be things that people, you know, write down or, you know, figured how they're going to qualify or quantify that. I know that's really researchy, but it's, you know, but you can see, you can actually measure tangible progress in any of these. It doesn't have to be something very technical, but you kind of want to be able to own any feedback you get, look at kind of, you know, the progress you're making or lack thereof and being willing to then, you know, adjust that bridge if you need to. Yeah. Do you check in on how your bridge building is going as it's being built and how do you how do you check in on it? Well, I mean, professionally, you know, our teams are very metrics focused and data focused, which is great. So, you know, helping the teams kind of look at, you know, what should we be tracking? You know, what is going to actually give us that measurement of success as we go? And again, that's qualitative and quantitative data. You know, personally, as I'm looking at kind of things I'm trying to achieve, it's kind of, I love planning. I use a lot of planning tools at home and just sort of just, in outlines and spreadsheets. And so I'm very organized that way. So I like to kind of look at the list of things and say like, did I actually commit any time to that this week? You know, and it's okay if I didn't, but still trying to achieve this or that, you know, I think lists are really helpful. You know, I'm also just getting feedback from other people too, because you know, people have blind spots and you might think you're on the right track, but people who know you and know what you're trying to achieve, you can also coach you and, you know, and also help help you get there as well. Yeah, I wonder how when you mentioned getting feedback, right? And I'm sure in your work, you need to collaborate with tons of different partners and from different functions. How might you use this model to kind of build a bridge in relationship to those that you collaborate with? Sure. Well, all these tools that I mentioned, like personas and journey maps and Blueprints, I kind of look at them as kind of understanding and alignment tools, their related tools, and a lot of it is just having that understanding of users or your customers and building that empathy, building that understanding in terms of the context of like, what is this person's background? What do they know? What capabilities do they have? What resources do they have? And building experiences around that. And the alignment part is really important. I use the term altitudes a lot. And what I mean by that is, especially the more complex organization, the more people you have, the different roles, everyone's kind of looking at the problems from different perspectives and usually different altitudes. So you often might have kind of an executive audience that's kind of looking at the big picture and they're kind of thinking about the general overarching achievements they want. And then you have people on the other end of the spectrum who could be very technical or process oriented and they're in the weeds. They're trying to solve day-to-day problems, keeping the train running. And then there's things that happen in the middle. But if everyone is looking at problems in different levels of context and specificity, we're kind of talking past each other. And so what I try to do is use those tools as ways to get people to think about things, at least where there's common ground. Because when we talk about building that bridge or looking to the future state, if we don't have that common ground, we're building kind of almost two or three or five different bridges that are not connected up. And then folks are not going to be successful in getting to that end goal. Yeah, even getting on the same page and aligning around, okay, for this project we're optimizing for the experience, for this other project, we're optimizing for time. And it's almost putting a picture in my head of, you know, how we use stakeholder mapping to be at the right altitude and on the same page is stakeholder mapping something that you spend some time on when you think about like all of these different things that are in play. Yeah, I think so. I think you have to kind of start there. I think you have to understand where your stakeholders are coming from. What mandates or expectations do they have? Do they have kind of okay hours or goals that they've set? And then trying to also understand where they sit within the organization because a lot of times we're working very interdisciplinary and across teams and and the more complex the problems we're solving the more that happens. So you can be talking to people that are within a sales domain, but in order for them to achieve what they need, they also need support from legal and finance and other teams, certainly engineering. And so how do you then connect up folks that have very different goals and ways of looking at things? So you have to start there for sure. When you think about these conversations and ways that you're approaching this information, we all have mental models that we rely on as we move through our work and our lives. How much of this are you asking people to kind of shift their mental model and how do you like help them to do that? Well, it's it is actually hard. It's hard to shift people's mental models because usually a lot of it I call a mental baggage. You bring that baggage with you all the time. And so those could be biases for preconceived notions. It could be based on a lot of experiences that you've had or something that would just very impactful for you that still sticks in your mind. And fundamentally changing that is something that is very hard and isn't always necessary actually. It's just I think of honestly what I picture mental models. I'm kind of also picturing like really big Venn diagram. So you might have so you know you and I have certainly a shared Venn diagram for many reasons in terms of you know our shared understanding experiences and ways we think about things but we also have you have your own circle though that has your own values and perceptions. So what we're looking for is not I'm not interested in changing your circle per se but what I'm looking for is to try to create more overlap between mine and yours. And of course then picture that with all of your stakeholders. So it's not necessarily changing there's fundamentally but it's realizing that I can add to their mental model. I can look for you know I'm really looking frankly for the commonalities that already exist and building all those. Yeah it there are so many great connections to that original metaphor of the bridge and understanding your gap and and having this is around having this like the right foundation that is solid and can we can build upon it. How do you know when it's time to just tear the bridge down and start over? I think you have to be willing to do that you know and I think realizing that if well I say there's there's a few things that we would be looking at to see if fundamentally the bridge is not worth building. That could and I I think of those as like disruptors and what I mean by disruptors is like things that fundamentally change the organization goals or or really shape things up. So the one that I actually point to in the book is COVID, which will all be all lived through that. But think about how companies were approaching work, how they're approaching social interactions, and so many aspects of life and work pre and post COVID. Coming out of COVID, many organizations would be building very different bridges than they had prior to that. So that's a big disruptor, which is more like a societal one. But AI, I would actually put that in the same category and that it's a huge technological shift where if even a year or two ago you had a bridge that you thought your organization was on, AI probably may have completely disrupted that bridge. We actually honestly, you might have to start over and just look at it completely differently. Now, your organization should not be tearing down bridges every week because that's not efficient and you'll never get anything done. But when you have things like COVID and transformed to AI, then it probably is time to do that. - Mm-hmm, yeah. And that wraps up another amazing episode of "Here's Why It Matters." We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you have any thoughts, questions, or just wanna say hi, we'd love to hear from you. Remember, you can always catch up on previous episodes and stay connected with us on social media. Find us at TMRWCoaching.com and "Here's Why It Matters" on Facebook and Instagram. Thank you, our dear listeners, for tuning in, your support means the world to us. Before we say farewell, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve and brings more amazing content to your ears. A quick reminder that new episodes go out every Wednesday, stay curious, stay inspired, and until next time, this is Teresa Washburn signing off from "Here's Why It Matters." Take care and have fun with what matters to you.