User Journey

A User Journey, known more formally as a Customer Experience Journey Map or User Experience Journey Map, is a diagram that describes the steps a user takes in order to accomplish a task. While in product design it’s used to track what a user does to accomplish a goal (for example to pay for an order at an online restaurant), I’ve found it useful in games when you want to understand how a player travels through an environment. This is especially true for linear games, though it can also help for a specific task in a more free-form game (for example, collecting in an open ended sandbox).

Each timeline is divided into segments called touchpoints, for our purposes an action a player is taking. There are hundreds of different iterations on the diagram, however the one I’ve used most successfully is having each touchpoint align player actions, thoughts and feelings. I also include a notes section where you can write how the game responds to the player actions, add a sketch of what the player sees/does or simply add more context to the touchpoint.

There are two ways to use User Experience Journey Maps:

• Forecasting — where you create a map trying to predict how the player will feel at different points. This can be then compared to playtests to see how far off the mark you are. (for example, players might feel confused at a moment you expected them to be excited).
• Analytically — Where you run the playtest first and then write down the results in a map to pass on to the rest of the team.

As far as I know the first documented example of this goes back to Jesse James Garrett in his book The Elements of User Experience. It has shifted and evolved a lot since then

1. Define the target player you’re making this for.
2. Define the scenario you’re visualizing.
3. List out the actions you expect players to do.
4. At each one of these actions (now called touchpoints), describe what you expect a player to be thinking.
5. At each touchpoint, describe how you expect the player to be feeling.
6. Analyze

When listing the actions, tailor the granularity to the scenario at hand; e.g. hand movements might matter if you’re making a gesture-based experimental VR game, but not for a regular console game.

Let’s imagine that we’re working on a crafting system for a survival game and you want to describe how you expect a player to interact with it (i.e. using the user experience journey for forecasting). We want to describe it from the point of view of new players and we want to make sure that the new mechanics we’ve added are included.

For the purposes of demonstration, let’s assume the player wants to craft a health potion. This is a commonly used item that can be created by combining green herbs and purple flowers which can be found in different parts of the continent. In this case, the touchpoints might look like this:

1. Select a goal of what you want to craft
2. Travel to location A
3. Find item A
4. Travel to B
5. Find item B
6. Travel back to your home
7. Go to the workstation
8. Open Crafting menu
9. Drag items from inventory to the correct slot
10. Press craft
11. Play crafting minigame
12. Get results

At first this might seem like a lot of speculation, but think of it more as a gut check. If any part of the flow worries you, make the assumption and we can validate it later via playtesting. When making forecasts, resist the temptation to think that every part of your flow is perfect; try to identify weak spots to pay special attention to.

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